Fragile
by Phoenike
Summary: Commander Shepard solves problems. And what else is her one-sided infatuation for her turian squadmate than just another pesky problem? (In progress, five chapters)
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Unbelievably, this was supposed to be a short crack story. Unrelated to my other Mass Effect story, Strange Bedfellows. Different Shepard, slightly different headcanon about turians._

_I've chosen to pretend that universal translators don't exist. Space magic may explain everything, but they just don't make that much sense to me._

_A big thanks to my beta Elenilote as usual._

* * *

Flickering signs gleamed in the perpetual night of the ancient space station. Commercials droned, street music chimed and blared, shuttles clanked and hissed in their hidden tunnels. Whores, peddlers and pickpockets worked the crowd. Under everything else, muted rhythms from nearby strip joints and nightclubs throbbed like a heartbeat.

It wasn't the back streets of Chicago, but damned if it wasn't close enough to feel like home.

On a shadowed construction scaffold above Omega's maze-like Lower Markets, the humanity's first spectre leaned against a bulkhead and pretended to watch the throng below. She wasn't off duty, but it still had the feeling of R&R to her, standing there without either uniform or hardsuit or even a name. No Collector dropships, no possessed tech-zombies, no particle beams and seeker swarms screaming death above her head... no ex-lovers giving her the symbolic finger across a scorched battlefield. Just the weight of her shotgun against her thigh, darkness, and ten inches of steel behind her back.

And also, one seriously gun-crazed turian standing not twenty paces away from her at a kiosk.

The shabby little shop didn't look like much, yet the wizened batarian behind its counter presided over what was arguably the largest inventory of contraband personal arms in the Terminus Systems. If Garrus Vakarian believed in heaven, it might not have been very far from where he now stood.

Elena Shepard, however, was starting to believe she was in hell.

Three months after her resurrection, she could use every moment she got away from how her life had suddenly become Cerberus-shaped. And after the nightmares of Horizon, it had felt like a good idea to allow Garrus have a little fun. But stepping outside the Normandy and turning from 'Commander Shepard, Ma'am' to just 'Shepard' brought certain issues to focus. Ones she usually managed to hide under her more public, galaxy-sized problems. Ones that had very little to do with Cerberus, the Illusive Man, or ancient god machines capable of destroying all sentient life in the known universe.

The fitted new casuals Garrus wore were a nice change from his usual combat gear and baggy utes. Only the smart bandage that still covered the right side of his neck and face told of his french kiss with death barely two months ago. Shepard's memory was as good as it was cruel; if she closed her eyes, she could still see him being gunned down in that shitty holdout in the Kima District — and how his claws had reached for his Viper across the bloodied floor. If she'd ever wondered what he treasured most in this world, that day she'd received her answer.

_So, it has come to this. I'm jealous at a bloody sniper rifle._

Suddenly she heard a whirring noise nearby.

She spun, hand on her M-6. But it was only a commercial info drone. The shimmering sphere blinked softly and spoke in a whiny asari voice.

"'_Honey, not tonight. It was a long day at the office and my tentacles are aching.'"_

Shepard raised her brows as the asari's voice turned into that of an over-excited salarian.

"_Weary of excuses? Tired of being rejected? Frustrated by lack of excitement in your bedroom? Lustrox Pharmaceuticals. Help is closer than you think!"_

Sex aids. Apparently her aura of unrequited lust had caught the drone's interest. It was illegal to read pheromone profiles without consent in most civilized parts of the galaxy, but on Omega few such limitations on entrepreneurial imagination existed. A bit of unsolicited, non-invasive medical scanning was definitely not the most disturbing way her privacy could have been violated.

Shooting the damned thing would probably have been overkill. Easing her hand off her pistol, Shepard settled back to wait and watch, arms crossed, booted feet splayed on the scaffold, nigh invisible in her black combat jacket and fatigue pants.

Jesus, she needed a smoke. But she'd promised Chakwas she'd cut down. The state-of-the-art tech in her worked more optimally without added strain. Also, tar felt like shit in her squeaky clean new pipes.

"_Turian, krogan, human, batarian, asari — we serve all hormone__-__based species. Our clinically tested products will scientifically kindle even the most hopeless relationship!"_

Slowly Shepard's head turned back toward the drone. The salarian's prattle was replaced by the drowsy purr of a turian male, followed by another asari chirping in with false enthusiasm.

"'_Honey, what just happened? That was amazing!'_

"'_Thank you, Lustrox! A week ago he didn't even know I existed — now we're getting married!'"_

Finally, the salarian again.

"_Lustrox — guaranteed to drive your partner wild! Illegal in Council space. Not for pregnant __individuals __or juveniles of any species. Find our kiosk at the Upper Markets. Online purchases delivered to your address in discreet packaging."_

The drone quieted. After a nearly apologetic whirr it glided away. Shepard frowned and looked back down, where the batarian seemed to be demonstrating advanced terminal ballistics with his hands and a stylus.

'Illegal in Council space' was the most often used advertising catchphrase on Omega. In this case, it might even have been true. Recreational use of psychosexual drugs was banned in most lawful regions of the galaxy.

Shepard watched Garrus listen to the little ogre, his avian head bobbing occasionally in agreement. The white light of a nearby sign reflected on his silver exoskeleton, catching highlights on his fringe and the frame of his visor.

Back in the Alliance, Shepard had known better than to let on she found turians attractive. There were still people in the brass who'd seen their comrades mowed down by the birdmen in the First Contact War. Shepard wasn't going to endanger her career because of a fetish.

Then she'd died. And come back. And suddenly she was no longer Alliance, or subject to its xenophobic rules and regulations. In the Illusive Man's service she could have fucked varrens, and no one would have cared... well, no one outside her ship, anyway. But it had turned out harder than she'd thought, to make a turian think outside the box. Even a bad turian. After two months of ship life and combat missions together, he still didn't even seem to realize that his commanding officer was a woman.

Shepard stared at the spot where the info drone had hovered.

After a moment she touched the bug in her right ear. Down below, Garrus tilted his head and raised his hand to his visor. His familiar melodic, deep flange emerged from the comm.

"_Sorry, Shepard. I know this is taking a bit longer than I thought —"_

She rolled her eyes. 'I'll only be a moment' had been his exact words about thirty minutes ago.

"Don't worry, big guy. I need to take care of something. I'll catch you in the Afterlife before the meeting, alright?"

"_Of course, Commander. Be careful."_

"Careful of what? Getting my ass patted by a vorcha?"

She saw him shake his head. _"You know I'm just worried for the vorcha, Shepard."_

The line went silent, and Shepard dropped from her lookout to disappear into the crowd.

The Lustrox Pharmaceuticals outlet was situated in the nicest part of the Upper Markets, a five-minute shuttle ride from the bazaar. The district was shabby compared to anything one would find on places like Nos Astra, but at least Shepard had reason to hope that the owner wasn't just looking to make a quick credit with chalk pills. The store was clean and spacious, and the salarian behind its counter wore a lab coat that lent him a professional air.

"Good day, ma'am!" he piped as soon as Shepard had shuffled close enough to place herself in the category of potential customers. "How may I be of assistance?"

Shepard looked left and right, hoping no one would recognize her.

"Well, I heard this ad..."

"Of course you did. Please step inside, ma'am."

She approached warily. Two LOKI mechs slept folded behind the counter, and three surveillance cameras followed her every move. The transparent paneling on the store walls switched to opaque. Well, at least no one could see them, now, unless they happened to come in through the door.

The salarian blinked and smiled, not perturbed in the least by the respectable amount of arsenal strapped in tactical holsters on top of his prospective client.

"So, which one of our many adverts peaked your curiosity, ma'am? The batarian rash cure? The truth serum? Or something more... ahem, recreational in nature?"

"I need to... uh... kindle a hopeless relationship."

"Of course you do, ma'am. Species, gender..?"

"Turian. Male."

"Excellent!" The clerk's head bobbed. "And may I ask... how hopeless is your desired liaison?"

Shepard thought back to the times she'd drunkenly suggested that Garrus come to her quarters and calibrate something in her pants. She'd also asked if turians really had a retractable penis (the answer to which she already knew), and whether the length of their fringe was related to that of other parts. Once or twice she could remember being carried over his broad shoulder to her quarters and thrown on the bed... and left to simmer alone in her intoxicated passion.

Well, so maybe she sucked at flirting. But at least she'd honestly used every trick in her book. It was impossible for anyone to be so obtuse. The only logical conclusion was that he did not find her sexually attractive.

"Hopeless," she said blandly.

The salarian clucked, but did not seem discouraged. "Just to define the parameters, ma'am — have you reason to expect that your friend is at least responsive to females?"

Her brows lifted. Like most marines, Garrus indulged in the occasional asari hooker on his shore leave. And he'd told her about his encounter with an agile female operative back in the turian military. (Shepard still blamed herself for not using the opportunity. But saying something about her own rather considerable flexibility would have required at least half a bottle of batarian whiskey in her system.)

"Of course."

"But he shows no interest in human females, am I correct?"

"None that I know of."

"Ah." The salarian scratched his temple. "Hard to guarantee success when circumstances are so unfavorable. But something can be done to, ahem, create the desired mood. Just a second, ma'am."

The salesman brushed a finger against his console. After a few swipes and taps, a small rectangle in the counter slid aside to reveal what looked like a bottle of eye drops.

"What is it?" Shepard leaned forward as the salesman took the tiny container and placed it on the counter. The label on it used a Palaven alphabet, complete gibberish to her eyes.

"Turian female pheromones, produced during heat." Something in the salarian's smug demeanor reminded her of Mordin. "Synthetic, of course. Extraction from a live female would be... problematic. But the effect is entirely similar."

"And that is?"

"Lowered inhibitions. Elevated and prolonged interest in mating."

"Ah." Shepard swallowed, and straightened. The topic was one of the many taboos in turian culture. Their porn made a big deal out of the heat cycle, but Shepard wasn't stupid enough to expect that those holos portrayed the phenomenon with anything like accuracy.

"I've heard that turian women go into heat, but not the specifics."

"Turian sexual behavior similar to that of most other gregarious, hormonal species. Sex used to relieve tension, strengthen social bonds. But reproduction tied to an annual cycle. Presence of fertile females causes erratic behavior in males, so the sexes avoid each other during this period."

"I see." Did that explain the scarcity of turian females outside their colonies and homeworld? No, that made no sense — from what Garrus had told about 'relieving tension' on a turian warship, Shepard knew that there were women in their military. It had to be a cultural thing.

"And the price?"

The figure was higher than she'd expected, but nowhere near the limits of her generous credit from the Illusive Man. The bastard's accountants probably reviewed Shepard's every purchase... but it was unlikely that a place like this filed their transactions by the book. So she probably didn't have to worry that 'turian sex pheromones' would appear on her record of acquisitions.

In other words, the only thing that stood between her and the little vial was her own conscience.

Noticing her hesitation, the salarian pitched harder.

"Responsible use of such products is entirely safe. Two drops on a warm spot of body heightens turian sex drive without alerting your desired partner to use of chemical aid. In other words — he'll never need to know."

"It's still cheating."

"That, ma'am, is a matter of point of view. Nature did not evolve us for this environment, for its complications. Sometimes its course needs to be... helped. Do you not agree?"

There had been a time she would have accepted the salarian's twisted logic without hesitation. Back before waking up on that examination slab in the Cerberus facility, a puzzle of meat and high-tech, wires still sticking from her rebuilt body. But now...

She thought of the deep trust Garrus had shown her ever since they took down Dr. Saleon. He'd placed his life in her hands more times than she could count. Hell, after her death, he'd shaped his whole life in her memory. Could she really destroy that respect just for the sake of a shag?

Then she thought of his piercing eyes. Of his steady, knowing hands aligning the Viper for a perfect headshot. The exquisite precision of his talon as it pulled the trigger. What would it feel like, to be consumed by that alien heat, to be the center of all his attention? She shivered at the thought.

_Oh, crap. Who am I kidding?_

"I'll take it."

"Excellent!" Three-fingered hands conjured up a small bag and transferred the vial inside. In a daze, Shepard handed over her credit chit, and the salarian swiped it against his console. The machine chimed and spat out a receipt and a narrow leaflet, both of which the salarian deftly collected into the bag.

"Please read attached safety instructions, ma'am. Must not exceed recommended dosage. Overdose harmless for humans, but causes aggressive behavior, hypersexuality in turian males. In extreme cases, temporary psychosis."

"Right." She accepted the bag as if it might have bitten her.

"Keep container in safe location. The manufacturer warns of fragility. Lustrox Pharmaceuticals thanks you for your patronage, ma'am. Enjoy yourself, and have a great day!"

And with that she was standing outside again, wondering what the hell had happened.

_Did I just buy myself a turian sex drug?_

Temporary insanity, brought on by her raging ovaries. That was the only possible explanation. Without a word she walked to the nearest recycling chute and dangled the little bag above it.

But... there were over three thousand credits in it. And turians worked in the trash pits, too. Cursing under her breath, Shepard stowed the vial in her thigh pocket and fed the bag into the chute, safety instructions and all.

She just needed to get laid. That was all. When even Officer Lawson was starting to comment on her grouchy behavior, it was way past time to find a healthy human male and have some completely human sex to clear her mind.

Trying to shrug the surreal little episode from her mind, Shepard took the shuttle back to the Lower Markets and headed for the Afterlife, just in time for her appointment with Aria T'Loak.

o o o

It was hard to believe that most humans couldn't tell one turian from another. She would have known Garrus anywhere, even without the clan markings and custom-built visor — the shape of his fringe, the proud way he carried himself, how he seemed vigilant without looking totally batshit paranoid (a talent Shepard herself was yet to master).

She sidled through the drunken crowd and ear-splitting music and the mingled hormones of a dozen different species, and slipped behind Garrus where he stood at the bar staring into a glass.

"Penny for your thoughts?" she yelled as close to his auditory canal as she could get. She wasn't short for her species, nor was he exceptionally tall for his, but he still towered over her by seven inches or more.

He spun, and maybe it was her state of mind, but the way he loomed over her for a second took her breath away. Even if the menace she saw in him was anthropomorphic bullshit layered on his predatory physique by her brain, she still found it thrilling.

He relaxed against the counter and crossed his arms. "Shepard, don't you find that just a little bit childish?"

Now and then she was still struck by how much he'd changed. To her, it was barely three months since he'd left to reapply for Spectre training, with a last snappy salute and a respectful _it's been an honor to serve under you, ma'am_. And now... in the two years she'd lost, that deference seemed to have been bled out of him. Not that she enjoyed being treated like an icon. But despite how much she liked his sexy new-found confidence, she sometimes missed that wholly unconditional _yes, ma'am_.

"What? Don't blame me if you have instincts like a volus," she said, stealing a peek at his drink. It was something non-alcoholic and boring.

"I'll remind you of that the next time you need me to shoot five husks off your back." His face plates tightened in a small frown. "Is everything alright, Commander?"

For something so tiny, the vial seemed to weigh a ton in her pocket. "Of course."

"You sure?"

_Christ. _She could make a krogan cry and talk an indoctrinated spectre into putting a bullet through his own brain, but couldn't shit one turian ex-cop?

"Yeah, yeah. Just some human stuff I needed to take care of. You finished? We should go."

He seemed doubtful, but didn't argue. "Lead the way, Shepard."

o o o

Lately it had started to feel a bit less likely that the self-appointed queen of Omega would throw Shepard to a pack of hungry varren just to entertain herself. It was weeks since anyone had pointed a gun at the estranged spectre in her presence. If that wasn't the start of a beautiful friendship, Shepard was willing to admit she didn't know anything about criminal masterminds, after all.

Half an hour later — practically an eternity in Aria T'Loak's schedule — Shepard extracted herself from the clutches of her black leather couch. Close by, Garrus stepped from the shadow of a column. Aria's turian goons almost fell over each other trying to get out of his way. Shepard had always wondered where exactly Garrus stood in the turian pecking order, but he avoided the topic.

Was she staring again? She looked at Aria, who smiled, eyes glittering like pieces of glass — seeing far too much, as usual. Her manicured blue fingers toyed with the data chip Shepard had delivered.

"You should find yourself a nice young man to keep yourself warm. You look like you need to loosen up a bit."

The vial in Shepard's pocket burned like a freshly expelled heat sink. "Good idea. Recommendations?"

"Ask for R'Gok on the second floor. I'll drop your name. He'll introduce you to the best entertainers."

Shepard nodded. "I might do that." She turned to go, feeling the asari's cold, old eyes on her back, always watching from that eternally young and flawless blue face.

Outside the mass effect field that shielded Aria from both assassins and ear damage, the wall of sound was nearly deafening. Shepard descended to the level of mere mortals, aware of Garrus following one step behind her, one step to the right. It wasn't an entirely useless ruse to maintain. The presence of a big, scarred bodyguard tended to reduce unwanted interest in her person.

As they entered the crowd he stepped closer, close enough for her to pick up his higher-than-human body heat.

"So. Back to the Normandy, Commander?"

She stole an upward look at him. "Can't wait to play with your new toys? Hell, Vakarian, it's the best nightclub in the Terminus Systems. Maybe the whole galaxy. Live a little."

His mandibles twitched. He'd likely been to the Afterlife times enough to know its reputation. "Shepard, you just want to check out those entertainers."

"Hey, it's on the house."

They headed downstairs where the dance beats were replaced by darker rhythms that gave the asari dancers a chance to show off their skills. All the tables were taken, but soon as they appeared, one of them became mysteriously empty. They fetched drinks from a grumpy batarian bartender, Shepard waved off a couple of hopeful asari maidens in glittering body paint and not much else, and they sat down to enjoy their beers and a moment of companionable silence.

Well, silence, relatively speaking. At least the noise level was kept slightly more humane, down here. If only the table would have been designed for privacy, rather than display... Shepard kept stealing glances, trying to memorize other patrons without waxing obvious.

"At ease, Commander," Garrus murmured over his beer. "No one's scoping us, except for a few lap dancers."

"Yeah. Okay." She ran a hand through her hair, released a breath from her lungs, and settled back against the couch, arms on its back. "Christ. Maybe this was a mistake."

"Just be a good girl and drink your beer, Shepard."

"Yeah, yeah. Jesus, mom." She reached for her drink.

_Relax._ When had she last been able to do that? But for him, she always tried. And _that_ was the reason she took him with her wherever she went.

_Borderline delusional paranoia. Manic episodes. Obsessive-compulsive behavioral patterns._ The shrinks hadn't exactly minced their words after Akuze. She'd been close to an honorable discharge, back then — youngest commander since First Contact War and a mile-long list of commendations notwithstanding.

And here she was, now, a rogue spectre running an operation beyond anything the Alliance could even imagine. And a woman having a drink with the only person in the galaxy who could keep her sane with just a few words.

Her hand brushed her thigh pocket. Sure enough, there it was, three thousand credits and a big shovel of dirt on her own grave. Now that Garrus was there, drinking dextro beer and trying to keep his eyes from gravitating toward the asari dancers, the whole idea of using some sex drug on him felt ludicrous. No matter how good he looked in his snappy casuals.

Suddenly Garrus yawned, displaying a set of razor-sharp teeth, and shook his fringe and shoulders like a big cat.

"Sorry, Shepard," he muttered.

_Not exactly great company, am I? _For his sake she'd try to change that, too.

"So. Were you just flirting with that batarian boyfriend of yours, or did he actually sell you something useful?"

"Huh." He regarded her with hipshot amusement. "You're not really interested in rifle modifications, Shepard. Hell, your weapons don't last long enough to reach maintenance."

"Humor me."

"Alright, well... don't say I didn't warn you. I'd been looking for this prototype Ariake Tech stabilizer which is supposed to reduce excess temperature from spitting mass into the distortion chamber. It should extend the thermal clip life for the Viper by one round when properly calibrated."

"A whole round? Not shabby."

"Yeah... You see why I got excited. I could do a lot with that. Well, turned out that —"

True enough, Shepard didn't give a damn about weapon mods, beyond keeping her Eviscerator in one piece as she smashed it into a hostile's face. But she could have listened to him read hanar poetry and feel lucky about it.

Did his species do romance? He definitely had the voice for sweet talk. But while she'd seen her share of turian holos, not much in them suggested the birdmen had a soft streak.

Then again, 'bend over and spread your legs, Shepard' would have done just fine, most of the time.

Suddenly Shepard realized she hadn't been listening for a while. And Garrus was again doing that turian equivalent of a frown.

"— and as a bonus, it looks sexy when you pop the heat sink. You sure you're alright, Shepard? I seem to recall that when humans turn bright red, it means they're coming down with something."

She coughed. "No, it's just the heat."

"Heat?" His expression remained dubious. "I think the temperature's fine."

"Maybe for you, bread toaster." Truth be told, it _was_ kind of hot. Shepard shrugged off her combat jacket.

As soon as his eyes landed on her exposed arms and shoulders, she knew that stripping down to her fitted black tank had been a mistake. Her body was a weapon and a matter of pride — but right now she couldn't help thinking how different she looked from the slender dancers he admired. She was built to break people's necks and handle a grenade launcher, not to look pretty.

What would it take, for him to look at her like he looked at those slinky blue creatures? Maybe if she grew out her hair, slapped on some body paint... but no amount of paint or prayer would change the fact that she danced like a retarded volus.

"Didn't you use to have a tattoo, Shepard?" he asked. "The Alliance logo on your shoulder."

She kneaded the deltoid in question. "Yeah... but I was practically melted into my hardsuit when they found me. All you see is vat grown. I don't even have moles anymore. Tiny benign tumors all humans have in their skin, in case you didn't know."

"Damn. How do you know it's you and not a clone?"

"Well, a clone wouldn't have my memories, obviously. So I guess my brain's mostly intact. Anything else... your bet's as good as mine."

The fact was, the most interesting changes in her were more than skin deep. Shepard was stronger and faster than before, and her senses were sharper. Most poisons couldn't kill her, and her body could regenerate itself to some extent. One of the greatest surprises so far, however, had resulted from the fact that her body had indeed been completely unused. Shepard supposed she should have thanked the Cerberus bastards for giving her back full reproductive functionality, even if it had involved an awkward moment and a bloodied sheet.

"Another round?" he asked, and Shepard nodded. She didn't really like to think of her resurrection and its implications.

With him gone, she leaned back and dug her pocket for her cigarettes, then pushed them back. She didn't really need them, did she? It would be all right. She'd have a couple more drinks with him, then find one of those entertainers before heading back to the Normandy and throwing the salarian's drug out of the airlock. Her attraction to Garrus was just a weakness she had to bear, nothing more.

Just to prove herself that she could, she decided not to think about it and started going over the details of her next mission in her head.

Gradually she emerged from her thoughts to notice the passing of time. No one needed this long to get a couple of drinks from the bar. The club wasn't _that_ crowded. She twisted on the couch.

It took just a few seconds to locate his silver fringe, and why he'd been delayed.

Even for an asari, she was stunning — tall and slender, and possessed of truly gravity-defying assets. Her white bodysuit left little to imagination. But she was no dancer. Even without the armor, her face ink gave her away as Eclipse. And she might as well have been talking smoke scopes and armor-piercing rounds, because Garrus was definitely listening. Hell, if he'd had a tail, it would have wagged.

Shepard saw him gesture at their table. The commando's eyes brushed over her. Bold as you please, she turned back and picked something from her blue cleavage. Whatever it was, Garrus accepted it without hesitation.

Shepard stood.

Halfway to the bar, she realized what she was doing. She walked to the restroom instead. Safely inside a stall, she struck a glowing fist against an ad on the wall, hard enough to reduce it to static and crack the plast-glass board.

"Fuck!" she yelled, not caring who heard.

She'd been only moments away from smashing that bitch's blue face into the counter. And for what? What did it matter if Garrus screwed some mercenary slut with a boob job and too much makeup? She'd been planning to do the same. Well, not with an asari — but with some muscle-bound idiot who knew tantric massage.

Shepard dropped to sit on the closed toilet seat and fished out her cigarettes. With trembling hands, she picked one from the packet and lit it.

What the hell was wrong with her? Despite her diagnosis or ten, she'd always been good at keeping her shit together. Now... she'd end up murdering someone and rot in house arrest while the Reapers poured through the mass relays unchallenged. Just because she desperately wanted Garrus to do to her whatever he planned to do to that asari.

There was no way she could ever be just friends with him. Deep in her gut she'd always known that. So what if he hated her and left? Stopped keeping her sane? There would be no briefings, after, no post-op evaluation. No shrinks to declare her unfit for duty. Hell, the Illusive Man had seen her files. He probably thought her psychological profile was a _good_ thing. Maybe she'd do an even better job without anyone there to rein her in? If that logic was fucked up, well — so was she.

She took the vial from her pocket.


	2. Chapter 2

Back at the club, Garrus had returned to the table and was tapping at his omni-tool. The hologram's warm orange glow shimmered on his finely carved plates and textured skin.

Shepard still remembered the feel of his blood-slicked hide and bone under her fingers, back in Kima district while waiting for the medics to arrive. The undamaged skin at his neck had been unexpectedly soft, like fine leather with a pattern of small, smooth scales scattered in it. It was the only time she'd ever touched him, and now it felt light years away — just like him.

Maybe he was sexting the titsy asari? _Can't wait to put your clip in _that_ piece of precision hardware, eh?_ Hoping she didn't look like she'd just done something criminally insane, Shepard threw herself on the couch and reached for a heavy-bottomed glass with a finger of brown liquid in it.

Garrus closed his omni-tool. God, was he frowning? The salarian had said two drops should be undetectable..!

"Thought you got bored and went to find those entertainers, Shepard."

"Maybe I did. I move fast, you know." Shepard nearly winced, and emptied the glass as if it could wash away her lousy joke. The drink left behind it the burn of extremely strong alcohol, but little taste.

Garrus observed her with a bemused expression. "That was something called single malt scotch imported from your homeworld. The bartender said it's a delicacy. I don't even want to imagine the price tag."

"Well, at least it didn't come out of your vigilante's salary." She took her beer, leaned back and adjusted her leg holsters to be able to sprawl more comfortably.

Too late it occurred to her that if she indeed intended to seduce him, not sitting like a greasy freight pilot with a bad case of batarian rash might have been a good start.

How did Aria do it? That alluring drape of her stylish frame over whatever furniture she deigned to use? Shepard shifted her weight. Shin on top of the other, one hip out... a hand on her thigh... oh shit, he was giving her the weirdest look ever. Face burning, Shepard splayed her limbs, inhaled a third of her beer, and stopped just short of scratching her six pack and belching.

Thankfully, Garrus chose not to comment on her squirms. For a moment he concentrated on his own drink. Then he cleared his throat.

"So, what next, Commander?"

_A room upstairs and some of those lowered inhibitions I was promised?_ But he didn't look like he was near losing his self-control. Actually, there was no sign Garrus was feeling restless at all, beyond what could be explained by a few weeks of ship duty and combat missions. Maybe the drug just took its time to work.

Talking shop wasn't perhaps the sexiest of choices, but at least it wouldn't abjectly embarrass her. "Well, that assassin's dossier seemed interesting."

He put down his drink, and tapped one long claw against the table. "Illium?" His tone spoke plenty.

"And here I thought the turian in my squad would love a planet completely covered in surveillance cameras."

His mandibles twitched. "I prefer places where criminals point a gun at me, instead of a contract and a smile. And from what I've heard, those cameras tend to malfunction when someone with deep enough pockets passes by."

"So you don't want to come?"

"Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss you happen to the place for the world, Shepard. And we both know you're hopeless without me. You'll get lost and shoot yourself in the foot."

_Or end up dead. I know. _"And now I'm actually tempted to leave you behind, Vakarian. Maybe I'll ask EDI to teach you hanar flower arrangements."

"Ouch." He paused for a moment. "I suppose it'll be nice to see Liara again."

_Yeah. Another pretty asari for you to ogle. _She took her old-fashioned lighter from her pocket and thumbed it open. Its butane flame was bright enough to make her blink.

"You like her?"

"Liara? Who doesn't?"

"No, I mean 'like' her the way you 'like' the actors in Vaenya. Or those lap dancers you can't keep your eyes off."

"Oh." He rumbled a self-conscious laugh. True enough, he'd been looking. "Sure, she's a knockout. She's also three times as smart as both of us put together, so it's not like anything will ever happen."

The lighter spun in Shepard's fingers. "Maybe not for _you_, scars. _I_ could have walked up that alley."

"Oh?" He seemed to process this for a moment. "And you said _no?_"

"Not my type." Shepard couldn't resist giving him a look. But he wasn't paying attention. His alert blue eyes searched the crowd, and his visor glowed softly.

"It _is_ getting hot in here," he said, his voice low enough that without her sensory augmentations she would never have heard, not over the music.

True enough, the temperature was rising. More people arrived every minute. Most of Omega followed the batarian day cycle, which was of course completely off-sync with Normandy's Earth-based time. While Shepard's internal clock insisted on it being early afternoon, for the stationers it was nightfall, time to hit the clubs. But while the people around them might have been getting increasingly drunk and disorderly, Garrus showed no signs of going wild. Instead of lust, he seemed to be losing himself in thought. Remembering his time on Omega, perhaps? Sidonis and his betrayal, and people now lost?Shepard sighed and pocketed her lighter.

"One more?"

It was just an excuse to visit the restroom again, of course.

The drug wasn't working. But why? It seemed unlikely that the salarian had lied. Maybe he'd just been too cautious about the dose. Shepard couldn't remember ever seeing Garrus lose his calm. Perhaps he just needed more incentive than most. In the privacy of the toilet, Shepard applied two more drops, then paused to think.

In all honesty, what _did_ she expect to happen? Even if he felt a little restless, he'd hardly jump her in the middle of a crowd. Rather he'd just hook up with that commando and take her to one of the rooms downstairs, and fuck her brains out till he got better. _Am I going to let that happen? _With the alcohol starting to buzz in her system, Shepard added two more drops and headed back to the bar.

The batarian at the counter took her order without much of an expression. Shepard got the feeling he didn't like her much, but that was nothing new. Humans made up a small minority of Omega's population and prejudice toward them still ran rampant. Batarians were the worst of the lot. Then again, they hated everyone, so perhaps they didn't count.

The beers took their time to settle. Shepard stared at them, thinking. Had she overdone it? Would Garrus be able to smell the drug on her, now? To her, the pheromones gave off no scent whatsoever, but she knew turian senses were sharper than hers, augmented or no.

Perhaps she could cover the smell with another?

Shepard took a cigarette, tossed it in the air and caught it between her lips. But before she had a chance to bring out her lighter, a glowing omnitool appeared in front of her with its rope burner activated.

She turned her head slowly. The guy at her elbow was about six inches taller than her and sported a fancy fringe band and spacer tattoos. His sharp teeth were bared in a disconcerting leer she'd never seen outside of turian porn holos.

"Hey, baby," he rumbled. "I have a ship and a mate, and I only brought one of them with me on Omega."

She gave him The Look.

Turians couldn't blanch, but they could backpedal surprisingly fast. "Easy, human. Wear a mark if you're taken, okay?" He turned and walked away. "Spirits..."

_What the fuck was that? _Shepard had never been propositioned by a turian before. Humans just weren't their type.

Maybe the salarian's poison was finally working?

Slightly cheered, Shepard lit her cigarette, took the glasses and headed back to the table, where Garrus again closed his omni-tool.

"Aren't you trying to cut down, Shepard?" he asked, looking at the fag dangling from her lips. No sign of alarming leers, no awkward pick-up lines — so far so good, if one could say as much about _nothing_.

"Hey, it's low-tar. Actually, low everything, especially the fucking enjoyment factor."

"Are you the same lunatic who used to smoke batarian weed? You must be in hell."

She threw herself on the couch. "This smart filter shit tastes like ass, so show some respect, Vakarian."

"I don't know, I always thought you omnivores liked the aroma of cardboard."

"Hah! That's rich, coming from the king of blue snot bricks." _Shit, I'm doing this old war buddy routine again. Sexy as hardsuit crotch rot._

"Well, for a multi-billion credit war machine, Cerberus sure has a tendency to skimp on dextro food processors..."

Suddenly he seemed to lose his train of thought. His nasal plate shivered. Shepard nearly swallowed her tongue. She brushed the crucifix at her throat, just to keep from rubbing the spot on her neck where she'd applied the drug.

_You've always known you're going to hell, woman. Might as well enjoy the ride._

"Something wrong?"

"Uhh..." He settled back. Not many might have noticed, but Shepard knew he was rattled. Was he feeling hot and bothered, or just annoyed? "Never mind. Look... earlier at the bar, was that turian trying to pick you up?"

She puffed on her cigarette. "Yup."

"Hmm. That's odd. We're usually more... discreet in public."

_And don't make a habit of picking up soft slugs, eh? _She leaned forward to use the old-fashioned ashtray on the table — just one of the many reasons to like the place. Trash chutes had no soul.

"Discreet? Like you and that Eclipse porn doll? I could see your tongue hanging to your chest, Garrus."

"Huh." He shifted his weight on the couch. "Well, maybe I've worked up a bit of steam."

"Uh huh. And I seriously thought you turians don't go for..." She gestured in front of her chest.

He seemed confused. "Mammaries?"

"Now there's a big word. So it wasn't her rack you were drooling at?"

"No, that's not how it works. Our females don't nurse, they regurgitate. We look at different cues for reproductive potential."

Shepard nearly choked on her cigarette. "Regurg— that's disgusting!"

He seemed almost offended. "Your species feeds their young by excretion, and you call _us_ disgusting?"

"Sweet mother of God." She shook her head. "Well, since we're in the middle of a goddamn biology lesson — I've always wondered, what exactly is it about the asari for you guys? They don't look like your species at all."

"They don't?"

Shepard stubbed out her smoke and leaned back, arms on the back of the couch."Don't play coy, Vakarian."

He shifted again. "Uh, alright... they smell nice."

She raised her brows, knowing she was taking far too much pleasure in his discomfort. "They _smell nice?_"

"Well, uhh, we have a thing for certain pheromones," he said. "Aside from that, we like waists and hips. And the asari have a fringe, sort of. And they are very —"

"Flexible?"

He groaned. "I'm never going to live that down, am I?"

She grinned, and tapped a finger against her temple. "Eidetic memory, big guy."

"Nice," he purred, half-lidded eyes fixing on something behind her. Probably one of the agile blue things gyrating on the raised platforms.

And if it was, well — that was her own damn fault, wasn't it? Shepard wasn't drunk enough to lie to herself. What little effect the drug had, she was wasting it. She had no clue how to direct his wandering attention to _her _and not the over-abundance of nubile, half-naked dancers around them.

"Must be useful, not to need mnemonic devices," he continued in that slightly absent manner. "Would've been damned convenient in the C-Sec..."

She looked at the pitiful amount of liquid left in her glass. "Yeah, it's nice until there's things you want to forget."

"Didn't think you'd have regrets, Commander."

"Well, you said it yourself, once. Cerberus is just another gang. A real step up for me, huh? Once a crook, always a crook, I guess."

_That_ got his attention. "You can't seriously compare Cerberus to the Tenth Street Reds."

"Why not? Aren't they just another band of thugs with a bigger budget and a purpose?"

"A purpose is what separates _any_ organization from a gang. Shepard, you're using Cerberus to save people. And doing it well."

"Didn't feel like that on Horizon."

He hesitated for a second, then placed his spiky elbows on the table and leaned forward. "Commander... don't punch me, now, but is this about Alenko? You've been acting strange since that mission. I wanted to say I'm sorry. He of all people should know you better."

_No, it's not about some guy I once shagged. It's about you. _But she lacked the courage to say it. And most of all, she lacked the courage to look at the reasons why it was so damned difficult to make a move on Garrus — at least without enough alcohol in her blood to make it all into a bloody joke.

"Aww, fuck." Shepard rubbed her forehead. "Sorry. I'm being bad company."

He looked at his glass on the tabletop, then back at her. "You're never bad company, Shepard," he said, his voice barely audible over the music. "Crabby sonofabitch, yeah, but never bad company."

Suddenly she regretted ever hearing the ad, or stepping inside this club. Was conscience an organ as well, one that could be regrown like lungs or a liver? He didn't deserve to be screwed over. Not by _her_.

She cursed. She had no idea what to say, then just opened her mouth. "Garrus, listen. Maybe we should —"

She was interrupted by a very deep flange.

"_Human."_

Frowning in irritated surprise, Shepard turned and found herself staring at a turian crotch, clothed in a quasi-military grey uniform and a piratesque gun belt.

She tilted her head back. Far back. He was a big one. Bigger than Garrus. His exoskeleton was nearly black, his flame-shaped tattoos bright red, and his eyes were a disturbing shade of pale. Barely contained aggression radiated off him like too much cologne. Under slightly different conditions, Shepard might have thought him the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

"I accept your offer to mate," he rumbled in deeply accented trade speak.

Shepard leaned back and crossed her arms. "That's the most fucked-up call to dance I ever heard."

His mandibles flared. "You're making fun of me, human?"

"No, I'm suggesting you get the hell off my face."

For a moment the black turian just stared at her with his strange pale eyes. Then an obscenely long bruise-colored tongue slithered from his mouth and brushed over his exposed fangs. He barked something in a gravelly language she didn't recognize. It didn't sound like 'please'.

The table rattled and a couple of glasses upended as Garrus stood and stepped forward, growling.

Against Shepard's expectations, violence didn't ensue. For a while the two turians just stood there and stared at each other, fangs bared, unblinking, almost close enough to bump chest carapaces. What non-verbal sparring happened between them, Shepard couldn't tell. To her it seemed like motionless glowering.

Then the stranger narrowed his eyes, pulled his mandibles to his cheeks, and stepped back.

"Fine, Blue," he rumbled. "But this isn't over."

Garrus followed the other turian's retreat with his eyes. Shepard realized she was holding her breath.

_What the fuck just happened?_

Looking around, she noticed that the place seemed... darker. The music had become louder and more primal. And where the hell had all these turians come from? When they'd arrived, there'd been only a few scattered around. Now they seemed to make up half of the crowd. And they were really making the dancers work for their tips. Bouncers seemed to have their hands full, as well. Somewhere close, a glass shattered, and a woman screamed.

As if shaken by the sound back into the moment, Garrus looked at her over his shoulder. Shepard knew turian body language well enough to pick up casual signs, but there were still expressions she could only guess at, and very vaguely. Right now, she sure as hell couldn't tell what he was thinking.

He blinked. "Shepard. I'm not —" The words died, choked. Garrus looked away, and cleared his throat to try again. "Forgive me, Commander. I need to go for a minute. Please do not leave the table. It isn't safe right now."

She opened her mouth, but he was already moving, his springy predator's gait taking him into the seething, dancing, drinking crowd. She got the vague impression he was escaping.

The nausea she felt had nothing to do with alcohol.

Trying not to over analyze the situation, she settled back against the couch. _Maybe he just went to the lavatory? He's had three... no, four beers without going. Occam's razor, woman. Stay focused. _She closed her eyes for a second.

When she opened them, an asari maiden was standing next to the table, her perky tits painted with concentric, multi-colored circles that stared at her like monstrous eyes.

"Good evening, Commander Shepard," she chirped. Shepard almost groaned.

"Not interested, honey."

The asari's smile didn't falter. She placed a thick-bottomed glass on the table. "Forvan sends his regards, ma'am."

"Forvan?"

"A bartender." The asari winked and sashayed off, her perfect ass wiggling in a scandalous pair of sequined hot pants.

Shepard looked down. Another shot of that expensive single malt. _Just what the doctor ordered._ She emptied the glass and leaned back, appreciating the alcohol's burn down her throat, longing for the rest of the bottle to wash away her guilt.

There was probably a perfectly ordinary reason Garrus had needed some time out. But what? And what had his odd parting words meant? _It isn't safe?_ Was there something going on she should have known about? Wasn't she more than capable of taking care of herself?

Again, she made an effort not to think too much.

The music was starting to crawl under her skin. Hypnotic sounds, instruments she couldn't recognize. In the loud, hot darkness of the club, nauseating red lights pulsed like tiny migraines. So many people... far too many to keep track of, even with her powers of recall. A bead of sweat rolled down Shepard's neck.

What if she'd been compromised? The salarian must have seen her name when swiping her credit chit. He could have tipped someone off, someone who had followed her here, and now waited for his or her chance. Maybe that asari dancer, there? Or that turian with white face paint? Both had been eyeing her for as long as she could remember.

Well, whoever it was, was in for a nasty surprise.

Shepard's fingers touched the Eviscerator on her thigh. She thumbed the safety and squeezed the weapon's cool metal in her hand. It felt familiar, reassuring... and far colder than it should have. The patterns carved in it shivered against her skin —

She shot up from the couch.

Stumbling like a drunkard, she stepped away from the table and elbowed her way through the writhing mass of bodies on the dance floor. Her stomach was a red knot of pain. Someone tried to pull her into an embrace, and she punched and felt something break under her fist.

After what felt like a mile of trying to stay on her shivering legs, Shepard reached the restroom and stumbled into a stall. Two fingers down her throat, she fell to her knees and emptied her stomach into the toilet.

The pain eased with every heave. But in her head, the mess was growing worse. It was becoming hard to think —

She came to on the tiled floor, draped around the metal seat.

Her nausea was mostly gone, but her mind roiled. How much time had passed? She wiped her lips and blinked at the ceiling above. She felt bruised, as if she'd stumbled against the toilet on her way down. Outside, someone who sounded like an upset asari was speaking into her communicator in one of the thousands of languages of the galaxy Shepard couldn't even recognize.

_Paranoid my ass! I'm never going to listen to another shrink again!_

After a while, Shepard got up, stumbled out of the stall and washed her mouth under a tap, dimly aware of possible lethal bacteria in the ancient water pipes, but knowing that the poison was a bigger problem.

How much of it was left in her system? And would her implants be able to take care of the rest? She pushed away from the sink. People walked by, throwing her curious glances, but they quickly minded their own business when they saw her expression. She leaned against a wall and tried to muster enough strength to think.

How had she been poisoned? With something in the scotch? Or was it a slow-working toxin in the salarian's drug? Shepard fumbled at her thigh pocket — only to find mere pieces of crumpled plastic within.

"Jesus fucking Christ..!"

The vial was broken — crushed against something when she lost consciousness. Only a tiny wet spot in the fabric of her fatigue pants remained of what had been inside. Shepard wiped the back of her hand against her damp forehead.

_Great. Now what?_

The only thing she knew for certain was that she couldn't stay here. Someone was trying to kill her. That someone would probably soon come to check on the success of their attempt, and follow up on its failure. Shepard needed to get somewhere safe, fast... or failing that, find someone to watch her back while she recovered. Preferably someone she could trust.

She forced her legs to move.

Beyond the restroom door, the hot, noisy, black atmosphere of the club rolled over her like a nightmare. Faceless strangers walked into her, forcing her to stumble out of their way and lean against a wall. She stood there, breathing deep, and tried to focus.

Garrus would know immediately that something was wrong. He'd take her back to the Normandy, to safety.

But she had no idea where Garrus had gone.

She looked above the moving mass of shapeless heads, searching for an exit sign. But the lights near the ceiling were just meaningless splashes of color.

_Perhaps he's back at the table._ She stepped in what she assumed was the correct direction.

Suddenly an iron grip twisted her arm behind her back.

Someone strong and determined shoved her face first into a shadowed corner. Hot, wet breath laved the back of her neck, smelling of metal and, of all things, liquorice.

"Human," a deep, accented flange rumbled in her ear. "I repeat my offer."

Shepard's attempt to reach for her shotgun was checked by a three-taloned hand that nearly crushed her wrist. Well, at least keeping her from struggling prevented the attacker from disarming her. She opened her mouth to yell.

Even in her drugged state, she recognized the sharp end of a knife pressed to the small of her back, and froze.

"I'd reconsider, bitch."

Shepard felt a familiar calm descend upon her. She no longer resisted as her pistol and shotgun were thrown away. She didn't need a gun to kill a man. But she needed the right moment. This — with the last dregs of a poison coursing through her veins, a knife pressed to her spine — was not it.

Strangely, after the nausea had passed, she no longer felt bad so much as... electrified. Every flash of color, every sound and touch seemed intensified, twisted. _So hard to get and stay high. Never thought I could just try stronger substances._

The turian pulled her from the corner and walked her through the crowd, hands behind her back. Just one of the many mismatched couples frequenting the place — not that the ruse was even necessary, since no one seemed to be paying them any attention. A wave of insanity was sweeping through the club. A group of partygoers fought around a screaming asari dancer, and two turian bouncers were trying to separate them. One of them accidentally elbowed the other, and suddenly they were at each other's throats. Other species were joining in — mob mentality needed no drugs to work. The air stank of sweat, asari perfume and alcohol.

They went through a side door, into the cooler air of a back alley, lit by the cold white glare of a nearby street light. The door slammed, and in the sudden silence Shepard heard the raw breaths of the turian as he manhandled her across the street. A pox-ridden vorcha scurried out of their way, just in time before Shepard was pushed against a bulkhead behind an abandoned kiosk that gave them at least the semblance of privacy.

She felt the turian shudder behind her, like an old machine starting, and then a deep purr rose from him, a sound unlike anything she'd ever heard. It was not like a cat's purr. It was definitely not the smooth, digitally sanitized sound familiar from porn holos. It was much more primal; it resembled the noise of some ancient engine, with something desperate and ragged to it, as if he was fighting it.

He pushed against her, hot and heavy like a stove. She could feel that he was unplated. Through their clothes, his erection felt like something carved out of stone against the small of her back. For some reason, it seemed less obscene than his purr. Perhaps it was?

_Is he going to do it _here?_ He must be even crazier than I thought._

"I know what you want," he rumbled in her ear, his deep voice struggling its way around the purr.

"Yeah?" she gasped.

"Yes. I can give it to you."

In his shadow, Shepard bared her teeth. She'd killed things stronger and far more dangerous than him. "Do it, then," she said.

"I will." A long, hot, surprisingly wet tongue traced the back of Shepard's neck. Was her thrill anticipated violence, arousal, or both? No matter. There was only one way this could end.

She felt the knife lift from her back and the pressure on her wrists disappear. The turian pulled back to fumble at his clothes.

Exploding into action, Shepard sank her elbow in the flexible plate structure under the turian's chest carapace. The purr ended in a vicious snarl as he staggered away from her, spitting curses. Shepard spun and her combat boot connected with the attacker's jaw. He went flying, scattering trash boxes and scaring another vorcha from its hiding hole as he hit the street.

Shepard whipped her right hand to the side. The amp in her brain sang and a blade-shaped distortion field sprang from her eezo-laced flesh. Hand curling into a fist, she dove after the turian and closed five steelplast-boned fingers around the ropy tree trunk of his throat. The servos running down her muscles kicked in. His windpipe croaked as it constricted inside its cartilage sheath. Shepard's bladed right fist pulled back, nerves humming with dark energy, more addictive than any drug.

"_Shepard, NO!"_

It was the only voice in the world that could have made her stop.

She froze, amp screeching with painful intensity. The black turian blinked and stared at her, stunned by the imminence of his own death. Blue lightning gleamed in his strange, pale eyes and on his red tattoos.

"No!" Garrus yelled again, closer this time.

And then he was there, and pulled her away from the stranger.


	3. Chapter 3

Her amp quieted and the biotic blade faded, leaving behind a familiar cold tingle. She allowed Garrus to help her up. Was the intensity in his eyes anger, concern, or both? She felt a demented urge to kiss him, even though she had no idea how he'd read the gesture. She doubted a turian forehead rub would have carried the message she wanted to convey.

Then he released her as if struck. On top of a lot of things she couldn't read, his expression registered disbelief.

"Spirits, Shepard, you stink like a brothel."

She chuckled, a bit more morose than intended, and sagged against the bulkhead. "Yeah. Might need a shower." _Incendiary ammo __could __also do the trick._

She could almost hear him grind his fangs. "Commander, I — with all due respect, I asked you to wait, and for a reason!"

"Sorry, big guy. My date insisted." She jabbed a thumb toward the flesh-and-bone tree trunk lying on the street. Her elbow had probably connected with the turian's equivalent for a midriff, for he was moving very little.

Garrus wanted to argue, she saw it in how his shoulders squared and his neck stiffened. But instead he just looked at Black and bit back his words. Even in her less than crystal clear state of mind, Shepard understood the reason for his agitation. His anger at her was in direct conflict with the obedience hammered into every turian in military training. Not being a very good turian, he might have disrespected someone else — but not her.

"I suppose you must have had your reasons, Commander," he said, the most reluctant she'd ever heard him concede to her superiority.

She watched as he went to pick her weapons and jacket from the street — apparently brought from inside and tossed when he'd seen what was happening. She took them from him, and succeeded in restoring her arms and appearance, aware how he immediately put distance between them and barely even looked at her. His back was a tense line of conflict.

She could sense him almost vibrate with pent-up energy, but why wasn't he turning into a rape-y lunatic? With the bottle broken, there must've been enough of the stuff floating in the air to send a whole platoon of turian soldiers go gaga.

"Where'd you go, anyway?" she asked, wondering whether someone else in her shoes would have felt embarrassment. That bit of emotion had never really been part of her psychological toolbox. Absently she rubbed her temple; she seemed to be developing a headache.

Garrus scowled menacingly at the flock of curious vorcha that had gathered beyond the street light's perimeter. "To locate a dealer who could sell me the blocker," he said, eventually, as if reluctant to admit he was aware of what was going on.

"Oh." She frowned. So, he wasn't immune. Did it also explain his lack of reaction? "You find one?"

"No."

Before Shepard could think of anything more sane to say than _the fuck_, she heard a groan from the street. Garrus wheeled.

"You. Get the hell out of here!"

Black had pushed himself to lean on his elbow, pale eyes blinking. At Garrus's words, they fixed on him.

Not stumbling nearly as much as might have been expected, Black got on his feet. A human jaw would have been shattered by Shepard's kick, but of course these bastards were all partially metal — a lightweight organic one, but metal nonetheless. It took more than some fancy street-fight moves to break their bones. And from what Shepard could see, Black seemed neither badly hurt nor in a hurry to get away.

Once more she found herself in the presence of two large, aggressive aliens trying to stare each other out of existence.

"You again," Black drawled in his accented trade speak. His booming voice sounded more hoarse than before, perhaps due to being forced out of a bruised throat.

"I'm giving you a chance to walk away, pal," Garrus responded, both voice channels dropping several notes from their usual register. "I suggest you take it."

"And I suggest you keep your human whore on a tighter leash, _pal_."

Garrus's fangs bared, mirroring Black's threatening grimace. "Excuse me?"

"Can't hear from all the human cunt wax in your ears? Did you know she was begging me to stick it in? Guess yours doesn't tickle her enough."

The Garrus Shepard knew would have responded with a glib remark about who exactly had been on top when he'd arrived. But the one she was looking at now remained ominously silent. She couldn't help noticing how Garrus pulled his jaw toward his chest, how it tilted the long blades of his head crest toward the ceiling as if to make him look taller. She was suddenly reminded that he was several years her junior.

Black spread his hands in a challenge that, despite their differences, was all too familiar to Shepard from her gang years.

"What's the matter, Blue? Not man enough to fight me?" The expression on the guy's face could only be called a sneer. "Should have known. All you homeworld high-castes are pussies. Good for you that those human sluts are always open for everyone. You couldn't get a real woman to unplate anyway —"

The Garrus Shepard knew would definitely not have growled and launched himself at the stranger.

Black barely tried to dodge. He took Garrus's punch with a shake of his head, danced back to avoid a follow-up grab, and responded with a vicious roundhouse kick. It connected, but Garrus merely grunted and kept on coming.

Beyond the street light's glare, the vorcha tittered in excitement and started exchanging bets.

After a few tentative moves and skirting, things happened too swift to make complete sense of in Shepard's addled condition. The fight was a hot mess of styles from what resembled jiu-jitsu to boxing to grappling, all mixed into a blur of kicks, rolls, blocks, grabs and creative use of surrounding spare objects, fast as hell and generously spiced with vicious snarls and whatever passed for turian testosterone. It looked exactly as deadly as one could expect from two well-trained men weighing twenty stone and having sharp claws and built-in brass knuckles.

It was brutal, but it didn't last nine rounds. Before long, Garrus twisted himself out of a grab, took Black down with a neat shoulder throw and struck his hand in the guy's neck under his mandible.

When he got up and Black didn't, the vorcha hissed, some in disappointment, others in triumph.

Garrus shook his fringe, his back turned on Shepard. His shoulders rose and fell with breath. His new clothes were rumpled and dusty, his jacket torn at the shoulder, and dark blue blood trickled from his neck where a claw had connected.

"You okay?" Shepard asked, not feeling too great herself. She wasn't entirely sure what had just happened. Garrus had never been the type to get into a fistfight after a few beers. The worst he ever did was tell bad jokes and brag. Well, at least Black wasn't dead; his chest was still moving.

At her voice, Garrus raised his head.

Slowly he turned. With the street light's glare behind him Shepard couldn't really see, but something wasn't right.

"Garrus?"

Moving with the predator grace she'd seen in battle, he crossed the street and slammed her against the bulkhead. His chest was heaving, his breath coming in deep, ragged huffs that bathed her face with hot air. He smelled of steel, spice, and something dangerous, and while the intensity Shepard sensed in him was familiar, there was something very _wrong_ about it, like an overheated plasma rifle about to go off.

_So, this is it. This is what the salarian warned me about._ Shepard's heart raced, and it wasn't all just self preservation instinct.

Then Garrus shuddered, and something close to reason returned in his eyes. He released her and staggered back.

"Shepard." His voice was raw. "What did you do, bathe in it? It's coming through my inhibitor!"

_Inhibitor? _Sweat broke on Shepard's skin, despite how cold she felt. Her headache was getting worse.

"An accident," she croaked. The vorcha around had started to creep away, bickering among themselves about the fight. Apparently they weren't interested in its aftermath.

Garrus's eyes flamed. "An accident? I could have killed that guy!"

"Well, he sort of had it coming..."

"He was in the mating fever! No turian court would hold him accountable, and neither will I!"

_Mating fever? _Shepard wiped her forehead. It felt clammy to her touch. "Right. Gotta remember that excuse the next time the turian Councilor decides to chew me out on something..."

"You find this amusing?" Garrus paced. "Commander, I've always known you have a twisted sense of humor, but if this is your idea of a _joke_, I can only tell you that it's a very, very — very —"

Shepard swayed.

Garrus stopped immediately. "What's wrong?"

"I'm alright."

"The hell you are!"

Shepard chuckled. "Just one bartender's special too many."

Garrus straightened, concern warring with anger on his features. The light of his visor wasn't tracking with his face. "You're not just drunk, are you?"

"Nah." By now, strength was leaving her one muscle at a time. The pain in her head had grown to a point where it threatened to split her skull. Probably better to just cough up the truth. "Poisoned."

"What? When?!"

His voice seemed to come from far away. She wasn't seeing too good, either. And she knew why. Having monitored her adrenaline levels, her cybernetics had assessed that the danger was over, and were now starting to shut down for emergency repairs. Since they amounted to approximately half of her neural pathways, it meant that she was shutting down, too.

"Sorry b-buddy. 'm goin' away for a while..."

"Shepard!" He stepped forward, but for all the good it did, he might as well have been a mile away. _Not much of a first date, eh?_ Shepard nearly laughed at the nonsensical thought. Then her knees gave way and her mind spun into oblivion.

o o o

She came to with the Normandy's airlock shutter blaring and the light of the decontamination beam piercing through her eyelids.

"Logged, commanding officer onboard," EDI announced pleasantly. The AI didn't seem to give a damn that said commanding officer was hanging from her turian wingman's broad shoulder.

The door hissed. Garrus started walking. Shepard ran a quick, if a bit muddled analysis in her head.

Whatever one wanted say about Cerberus, they'd done a first-rate job on the high-tech crap that kept her running. She was already feeling much better. Only a faint throb remained of her headache; other than that, she felt nearly normal, if hungry and tired.

Garrus, on the other hand, seemed rather the worse for wear. His breath was coming fast, and he ran a fever on top of his higher-than-human body heat. It felt like lying on top of a radiator. Sweat rolled down Shepard's spine, to tickle the nape of her neck.

The corridor was dim, with muted white lights shining in its floor. Shepard recognized the hangar deck. Most of the Normandy's staff were on a short shore leave, with only a skeleton crew left behind to run things, but Garrus had still decided against walking in through the CIC airlock. Silently she commended him for his discretion. She didn't exactly like the idea of being found hanging on him like a disemboweled pyjak.

_Maybe I should tell him I'm awake? _Shepard was pretty sure she could have walked if she tried. She opened her mouth.

Muttering in his guttural Palaven language, Garrus stopped and punched a control in the wall. The main elevator hissed open.

"Shit! Is that Shepard? What happened?"

Almost audibly, Garrus snapped himself together. His sharp talons on Shepard's thigh tightened. Shepard muffled a squeal of pain and went completely limp. Dignity be damned, she wasn't going to look Jack in the eye right now.

"Ah, just remembering old times." Garrus's vocal harmonics rumbled through Shepard like a small earthquake. They sounded incredibly strained to her, but the young biotic probably couldn't tell, having been onboard a mere couple of weeks.

Jack hooted. "Damn, man! Why didn't you invite me to the party? Shit, are you bleeding?"

"Yeah, things got a bit wild." Garrus sidestepped Jack's attentions and headed into the elevator. "Sorry, but I gotta go. She's heavier than she looks."

Jack chuckled. "Sure. Kiss the big bad kahuna goodnight for me, handsome," she drawled just before the door closed.

The elevator hummed upwards. Shepard felt Garrus sag in relief.

Far too soon, the door opened again, this time to let in the marginally brighter lights of the crew deck. Shepard's stomach lurched as she realized where Garrus was heading.

"No Chakwas!" she managed to croak against his back.

Garrus stopped, one two-taloned foot in the elevator, one in the corridor. "Shepard? You're awake? Hell, you were poisoned! I'm not going to just —"

"That's an order, Vakarian!"

After a moment of internal struggle, he stepped back and hit the controls again. "Dammit..!" To her immense relief, the crew deck disappeared from view, and a few seconds later they appeared in the short corridor leading to her cabin. At Shepard's muffled command the voice-coded door slid aside, and Garrus carried her into the loft, dimly lit by the great, empty aquarium.

_Well, at least I managed to get him into my quarters again._ But there was little time to enjoy her achievement. As soon as they were in, Garrus headed for the bathroom, where he unceremoniously dumped her on the shower floor and went to rummage through a cabinet in the back. Shepard groaned in protest and pushed to sit against the wall.

Soon, Garrus came back with a medical scanner. Without a word he knelt and ran the device against her chest. Almost immediately it beeped. He picked a primed hypo from the scanner and pressed it against her neck.

It _stung_.

"Fuck!" Shepard slapped his hand away and rubbed her neck. Whatever the scanner had synthesized, there had been a lot of it. "I'm all right, dammit! My implant can handle it."

"Not taking any chances, Commander."

Shepard groaned. Then the absurdity of the situation struck her, and she grinned around the lingering pain. "That sounds awfully like insubordination, Officer Vakarian."

"Just making sure our mission doesn't fail."

No... not insubordination. Just plain, old-fashioned stifled rage. She frowned and opened her mouth, but Garrus had already started to stand up. _Shit, he's leaving._ She scrambled to stop him.

"Wait, wait — shit!"

He'd struck his fist against the shower controls, causing a torrent of cold water to hit her, clothes, weapons and all.

Before she could get on her feet, he'd turned his back. She heard the scanner and hypo being thrown in the sink, and then the bathroom door opened and closed, leaving her alone.

Sputtering in outrage, she stood up under the pouring water.

Her first urge was to run after him. But apparently the effects of the poison were finally wearing off, because she realized almost immediately how ridiculous that would have been. Garrus had done exactly what he should. He'd brought her to safety, seen to her injuries, and then extracted himself from a hazardous situation, said hazard being the pheromones that undoubtedly still clung to her.

Raising one hand to the wall, Shepard pushed wet hair from her forehead and spat water from her mouth.

Thinking back to what had happened felt like watching a shipwreck in slow motion.

Deprived of the soothing mental blanket of mind-altering toxins and alcohol, Shepard wondered if the hollow, ugly feeling in her chest was shame. It certainly wasn't just regret for having being caught. And it wasn't the first time she'd experienced it, either; not since waking up after her resurrection with Officer Lawson's voice crying in her ears, telling her to stand up and fight.

Suddenly incredibly tired, she leaned against the shower wall.

They confused her, these useless feelings. As if more than just her flesh had been regenerated in those Cerberus vats. At times it almost felt like she was being haunted by the ghost of the woman she could have been, without the streets, without Reds. Without the hell-and-beyond of Akuze. She no longer carried the ugly scars of those things on her and, uninvited, a stranger had emerged to share her brand new, baby-smooth surface, wanting things she'd had no need for before — integrity, purpose... others she did not even want to name.

Eventually, she peeled off her wet clothes and weapons, took the soap and turned the water so hot it nearly scalded her. As she proceeded to scrub herself, she had an unpleasant feeling that her newborn guilt would be much harder to get rid of than sweat and synthetic pheromones.

o o o

Leaving the bathroom, it came as no small surprise for her to find Garrus still waiting in her cabin.

She stood in her tracks at the door that allowed steaming, hot air into the loft, wet shotgun and pistol under her arm, wrapped in a towel — thick white terrycloth with the Cerberus logo hand-embroidered in it, because obviously no self-respecting stealth frigate could go without fucking luxury grade household supplies. Other than that, only the crucifix she'd gotten from her mother remained on her. Not even dog tags accompanied it. Cerberus didn't care for the tradition, and her Alliance ones were lost in some trash bin, among other useless things that had been peeled from her corpse, such as her skin.

He stood leaning against the aquarium, arms crossed and head downcast. In the dim cabin, the fish tank's light cast a blue halo on his silver plates and fringe. The loft was designed to meet the requirements of human comfort, and he looked larger and more alien than he should have, his familiar spikes and angles oddly foreign to the dimensions she'd grown up taking for granted.

At the sound of the door closing he looked up. The display on his visor came to life, and with obvious effort he brought himself to stand in something close to attention, hands behind his back, gaze attached to a spot above her shoulder.

"Ma'am. Request permission to use your bathroom."

She'd half expected him to carry on from where he'd left, torn between anger and escape. But this... she wasn't sure she preferred it. Actually, she might have preferred a left hook and being kicked while lying on the ground.

She tried giving him a lopsided grin. "Ma'am? Isn't that a bit formal?"

Garrus lowered his chin. His eyes flickered toward her briefly. At first she thought that what surfaced through his stiff demeanor was reproach. Then she realized it was pain.

With a pang of lucidity she understood some of what he must have gone through, carrying her through Omega with the salarian's drug all over her. Maybe she should have wondered how the hell he was still _sane_.

"Please, Commander," he said and looked away again. Something in that gesture twisted her to the bone.

"Of course. Go ahead."

He nodded and wearily pushed himself to motion, heading for the bathroom behind her. She turned and dropped her weapons on the desk, grateful she could disassemble and clean them in her sleep, because she sure as hell didn't have brain cycles left for _thinking_ about anything.

She waited for the sound of the door. When it didn't come, she turned, a hand on her towel to keep it from falling.

He was looking at her sideways and down over his shoulder from the door, barely an arm's reach away.

"Commander," he rumbled. "Can I ask you something?"

"Garrus, you don't need my permission for that."

He looked away. Then he turned to fully face her. "Did you know?"

She pretended not to notice how her heart rate picked up. "Know what?"

"About the inhibitor."

_Still trying to save your illusion about me __as something else than __a complete asshole? _For some reason she didn't feel as relieved as she should have, to be offered an easy way to save face.

"Of course," she said. She knew his visor had a built-in lie detector, probably enabled by default, but she also knew those things didn't work on her. It was one of the things Cerberus hadn't needed to fix. She didn't like to think too much what that little detail told about her.

He looked aside again, talons clenching. "Shepard, mine's barely working any more! It's two years since I left C-Sec! Those things are military issue, they don't allow just anyone to walk in and get maintained!"

"Oh." She cleared her throat. _Is he really buying this?_ "Sorry. I didn't know."

"It's just —" His mandibles jumped. His subvocals were becoming rough. "Damn, let's just forget about it. I need to get rid of these clothes. Maybe I can rig the scanner to synthesize the blocker. I sure as hell won't go to Chakwas for it." He rubbed his forehead, making her wonder if he had a headache. "No, it's a levo only model. I guess you don't even have dextro painkillers?"

What was the expression he'd used?

_Mating fever._

_I did this to you, and you're still not blaming me, or asking why?_

"Sorry, Commander. I have to go now." Again, he turned, this time to finally enter the bathroom. Just as the door hissed open and soap-scented steam and harsh light poured out, Shepard at last gathered her nerve.

"Garrus, wait."

He stopped, one hand on the door frame.

The moment stretched.

"I could help you, you know," she said.

He tilted his head. It was a small, birdlike gesture, and once again it occurred to her to wonder if he was in the habit of toning down his body language, not to weird out the human majority of the Normandy's crew.

Slowly, he turned enough to look at her through his visor. "How?" he asked.

_You know how. _"You're not asking why I did it."

He shook his head. "No, that's not for me to —"

"I was curious." Shepard fixed her eyes on the flaking trail of blood on his neck. Some of it had soaked into the white fabric of his collar, staining it an electric blue. Would she get sick if she licked him there? "About turians. So I bought a drug from the Upper Markets."

The door hissed back into its frame, hiding the bathroom light behind it. Garrus looked left and right, anywhere but her.

"Right," he managed, at last. "But what does that have to do with —"

She inched closer. His shoulder hit the bathroom door. "Commander." Both his voice boxes were hoarse, now, and he actively refused to look at her. "I need to go."

She felt the same stone-cold crazy calm as in battle, the world focusing on one point of time. The twisted truth was coming from her mouth easily, now. _God, lying makes all the difference, doesn't it?_ "I did this to you, Garrus. The least I can do is to help you."

He finally turned to look at her in disbelief, his back against the door. "You're a human!"

Well, at least he'd stopped pretending he didn't understand her.

"You do it with asari all the time, big guy. What's the difference?"

"No, Shepard, you don't understand. The mating frenzy, it's — I wouldn't be able to hold back — "

_Oh God, please don't. _"I'm half machine, Garrus, I doubt you can break me."

Finally he hesitated. But the expression on his face was still much closer to shocked dismay than interest. The shimmering HUD in his visor flashed text, patterns — warnings? Then his eyes moved and the display quieted, with the occasional blink of standby remaining in its grid. He spoke very carefully, enunciating every word with what seemed like a hard-won precision.

"Commander. What you are thinking of would be a very, very bad idea."

She took another little step, like approaching something unpredictable and dangerous. And perhaps she was? Garrus stilled, as if trying not to breathe too deep. He still smelled of steel and spice — that at least had been real. The repressed need for action coming off him raised the downy hair on Shepard's skin. She suppressed a shiver.

"I can pull rank if it makes this easier."

His mandibles worked. When he spoke, his voice sounded thick, almost intoxicated. "That... would be abuse of authority... ma'am."

Shepard lifted a hand to his jacket. Fresh from the supplies this morning, it was now torn and dirty. But the thick cloth still felt soft to her hand. Through it, he radiated heat like an unstable fusion power cell.

"You still expect me to play fair?"

Garrus closed his eyes. His chest was starting to tremble under her hand. She saw him clench his fangs, as if trying to keep something inside. Strange as it seemed, like all his kind, he'd been conditioned to consider his simple vocal response to pleasure something lewd and indecent.

She took the final step and pressed against his crazy heat. He growled under his breath as the purr erupted out of him like distant thunder.

When he grasped her arms, she was certain it was to throw her across the loft. But instead, he pushed her back and crowded her against the desk. The towel sagged in her hand.

Eyes still closed, Garrus lowered his head to press his face to her damp hair. He swallowed and his tongue worked in his mouth. "You still have it on you," he said, his voice heavy gravel through the purr that continued even as he spoke. Shepard's breath hitched in her throat.

Much like earlier at the space station, he loomed over her, only the visor's now unmoving grid painting faint shapes of his face. The sound coming from his chest was very different in timbre from Black's. Its melodic, deep rise and fall felt alien rather than animalistic, but the message was clear enough to send a thrill down her spine. It was the single fucking hottest thing she'd ever heard. And at the same time, it was unmistakably Garrus_._ Shepard knew she would have recognized it anywhere, even without having heard it before.

He slid his hands from her arms to hold her waist. She breathed faster as he shifted closer, the fabric of his clothes pressing lightly against her, taloned feet balancing his great weight next to her own. He was unplated. At the evidence of his arousal, she felt her jaw slacken.

She could actually see some of his sanity slipping away.

Tongue flicking behind his fangs, he bent his great head next to hers and purred straight into her ear. She shivered and grasped the front of his jacket. The towel slipped as he pulled her to him. One of his hands traveled up her spine to the back of her neck, strong and steady... not hesitating, any more.

His mouth opened, and he licked the side of her throat where the softer, tender skin on a turian would have been.

"Oh, God." She shuddered all over.

His tongue was coarse and dripping wet, and so hot it bordered on painful. Vulgar images from the porn holos crossed her mind. It was the thought of what it would do to _her_ that undid her, that twenty-five centimeters of muscle much stronger and more flexible than a human tongue. On her, _inside_ her — _Christ._ She was ready, and he wasn't really even doing anything yet, just drowsily licking her throat and purring.

Growing bolder, she raised her hands to his neck above the collar of his jacket, where a series of elegant, interlocking plates protected his spine beneath the fringe. They felt more like bone than metal to her, smooth and fever-warm to the touch. As Garrus tilted his head to tease the soft skin beneath her ear with his teeth, she felt those plates slide over each other, ages of incredible natural engineering come together in this perfectly functioning beast that had not only survived the unforgiving radiation of its homeworld, but for dozens of millennia had ruled its landscape, hunting everything that moved on its scarred surface.

She ran her palms and splayed fingers down the warm hide of his neck, on one side broken by terrifying barely-healed scars and smart bandage, until she reached the skin beneath the spurs of his mandibles. Purring louder, he shivered and rumbled something unintelligible in his own language. Down at her hip, his erection stretched, held against his body by whatever he wore beneath his slacks. When his talons curled against her, she couldn't help but thank her maker that he didn't follow the barbaric old custom of sharpening his claws.

Did Garrus know anything about human women? It seemed unlikely. While turian-human porn existed, it was too rare for even Shepard to have found anything but a few nasty clips. Asari — the lucky bitches — were able to reshape themselves to their partner's morphology, but Shepard only possessed a vague hope she would be able to accommodate him. More so since it occurred to her that he might not have been completely aware that he wasn't in the company of another turian.

Despite his obvious strong arousal, it almost seemed as if Garrus was waiting for something to happen. Shepard knew that turian females used a complex pheromone language to signal their readiness for coitus. How forward would one have been? She slid a hand down his chest and waist, hanging to his neck with the other, and felt her heart hammer even harder as her fingers grazed the outline of his cock, pressed tight to the bend of his hip beneath his snug clothes. Of course she'd seen what it would look like, but it was another matter entirely to actually _feel_ how different it was. Breath stuttering in her throat, she held it, and squeezed —

Garrus shuddered from fringe to toe, and snarled.

Shepard danced on her feet as she was spun and bent face down on her desk.

"Shit —"

Hands seeking purchase from the tabletop, she felt her legs being kneed apart, and heard Garrus mutter, the harsh, consonant-driven sounds of his own language a much more ominous and complex match to his voice than the asari-based _lingua franca._ Some words reduced his subvocals into a mere growl.

His hands were on her ass, now. Suddenly gasping for air, she braced against the desk as he crouched. _Fuck, he's going to —_

The first touch of his almost-too-hot tongue made Shepard arch and yowl like a cat. She dragged her nails against the desk, scattering datapads, precision tools, gun parts. "Shit — oh shit — jesus motherfucking —" Garrus was trying to lick her open. But she had no unforgiving plates, just soft throbbing flesh and years of repressed fantasies, all of which suddenly came together in a single point as the tremor of his purr vibrated through her and his long pointed tongue slid over her and into her, making her toes curl. Her fist glowed as she struck the desk hard enough to rattle the things on it — and then she was coming, mewling and shuddering around her contractions.

_I will never, ever be able to have sex with a human again,_ she thought quite a while later. She was panting, covered in sweat, and couldn't lift a finger to save her life.

Garrus moved behind her. A taloned hand held the base of her neck, as if to keep her in place.

Something hard and hot rubbed between her legs.

"Fuck..!" She whined, still almost too tender after the orgasm, writhing — the last of her self restraint unraveling as burning wetness flooded her, lubricating her unnecessarily.

She nearly choked when, bending over her, Garrus started to push in, his deep purr of arousal now steady and loud and as patently inhuman as his shape. Helpless, she tensed as a surge of adrenaline made her heart race and the eezo in her flesh sizzle through her every nerve. She felt him shudder in pleasure, much like a human lover would have at the tightening of her muscles. With another guttural word he leaned down. Heated breath that vibrated with his purr raised the hair at the nape of her neck, before it was followed by a long, wet swipe of his tongue.

And then Shepard again became unable to think, speak or even remember her own name as she learned how turian evolution had ensured that their females would stay aroused and open through intercourse.

o o o

She woke up to the awareness of having overslept.

Looking at the bedside clock confirmed what she already knew. It was less than two hours until departure. She had been expected in the CIC at least an hour ago.

"EDI. Location of Garrus Vakarian," she said as she sat, throwing her legs over the edge of her mattress. Synthetic feathers swirled around her. The damned bed looked like someone had taken a knife to it.

The AI's physical representation blinked to life near the door. "Unknown, Commander."

Shepard was not certain when he'd left. In fact, she was not certain _how_ he'd left. Her memories after being fucked into the desk, fish tank, and her bed at least four times were relatively vague. She had a distant feeling she'd fallen into some sort of sleep-like stupor when he'd left the bed to visit the bathroom.

She stood and promptly swore as her knees nearly buckled from under her.

Feeling grateful that only the Normandy's cyber-warfare suite was there to witness her disgrace, she forced her legs to work and made toward the bathroom. _Shit, the place is a fucking mess. _Aside from the destruction of her bed, half of the things on her desk had been scattered on the floor, with the remaining ones toppled and rolled around (and maybe drooled on, but that was neither here nor there.)

"He's not onboard?" she continued.

"Officer Vakarian left the ship one hour fourteen minutes ago."

Such blatant disregard for the protocol was not like him. Then again, neither was the way he'd behaved the night before.

"Itinerary?" While Cerberus imposed fewer regulations on its personnel than the Alliance navy, crew members were supposed to leave plans and be reachable at all times.

"Unknown."

Frowning, she stopped. After a moment's hesitation she tapped on her ear implant to hail him.

Only the chime of an unanswered call accompanied the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She stepped in the bathroom and took a single look in the mirror. Without a word she fetched a pack of medigel. Fortunately, none of the bruises would be visible from under her uniform. She'd been worried of getting sick, but aside from a soreness in certain places, what discomfort she experienced didn't feel much different from having been in a close-quarter fight the day before. After a quick shower, she emerged back in the loft and headed for her cabinet. Swiping the door aside, she reached for underwear and socks.

Maybe she was feeling alarmed for no reason. He'd never really been recruited, had he? Despite being on the Illusive Man's payroll, he wasn't technically Cerberus. Perhaps he'd forgotten something he needed to do station side and was now too busy to answer. Like most turians, he had a flawless track record for being punctual.

But even as Shepard pulled on her service uniform and headed down to the command deck, she knew she was lying to herself. There was nothing wrong with his memory or his knowledge of protocol. Like all marines, he was perfectly aware that a warship waited for no one.

"Commanding officer on the bridge. XO Lawson stands relieved," EDI announced as Shepard walked out of the elevator into the familiar soft shimmer of CIC readouts, holos and overhead lights. The murmur of the crew quieted as they stood to salute her. Without breaking stride, she nodded to set them back at ease.

No one asked why she was late, or seemed the wiser to her inner status. Only Yeoman Chambers gave her a longer look than usual, that damned half-clairvoyant intuition of hers probably piqued by the less-than-fresh face Shepard had witnessed in her mirror just moments ago. She made sure to project her most terrifying presence as she took the small stairs to the galaxy map two steps at a time.

She plotted the course, with Joker and the navigator taking care of dirty details. Last checks were run while the Tantalus core warmed up. Reports from engineering verified that the latest ship upgrade was working to specifications. All crew members except one were confirmed as having reported for duty. Shepard's cold expression put an end to any enquiries. Even Officer Lawson quickly found something else to occupy herself than voicing any of her unsolicited and annoyingly perceptive questions.

At the last minute, Shepard tried again to hail Garrus. The link chimed and then went dead as the grave.

He wasn't just refusing to answer any more. He was actively blocking her.

She placed her hands behind her back and looked straight ahead over the holographic map that displayed their chosen course toward Illium through four mass relays. "EDI. Log Officer Vakarian as AWOL," she said. "Take us out, Lieutenant Moreau."

Only a second's hesitation betrayed Joker's surprise. "Aye aye, ma'am," came his matter-of-fact voice from the comm, then. With a barely noticeable shudder of her mass effect field, the Normandy undocked.

It was somewhere between Osun 3 and the Tasale Relay that Shepard finally knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what she was escaping.


	4. Chapter 4

_Sorry for the long wait. Changing jobs. Also, this chapter was incredibly difficult to write. My sincere thanks to ChampTheWonderSnail and Elenilote for their help with getting it to a point where I feel like I can publish it. One more chapter to go._

* * *

It was thirty years since the city had last seen real snow, but that night, with the lake breeze blowing cold air through the streets, the possibility did not seem too far away.

She was running down an empty avenue near the abandoned old Methodist Hospital, on legs shorter and less powerful than she was used to. Above her, between the aging tenements that held in their shadow everything she knew, distant skyscrapers where the rich people lived reached toward the sky like glittering claws.

Her sneakers sounded far too loud in the silence as she took a corner and sprinted down another narrow, windowless alley. A bag of spray cans on her back, an ancient taser and a half-eaten sandwich in her pockets — not much to keep her alive in case some Black Bloods found her, but she was quick and smart and had outrun and outwitted them many times before. Still, when she saw the fence that marked the border to home turf and safety, her heart felt a bit lighter, as always. She was tired, the wind was cold, and Nan was making roast chicken, and the new episode of _Pirates Of The Terminus_ had just been put up on Network 9.

Halfway to the fence, the sight of ominous shadows detaching from the night stopped her in her tracks.

_Hey, girl. Where you goin'?_

The mean, hoarse whisper seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

"Shit!" she hissed and doubled back. But more faceless figures had slithered from the dark behind her. She skipped to a halt, thin chest heaving, breath fuming in the chilly air.

A Blood patrol, keeping watch on their turf. There were six of them, all adult sized, closing in on her with the unhurried confidence of schoolyard bullies. Her hooded head swiveled, but there was nowhere to go.

Yelling would be useless. In this neighborhood, no one would come.

_What's in the bag, girl? You been painting tenners for the Reds? Ain't it a bit late for young girls to be playin' around? Little Red Riding Hood._

The ragged snickers that followed carried a sentiment she shouldn't have been able to understand.

When she pulled out her taser, they almost howled at the sight. Grease necks like them probably just got a kick out of getting shocked. But they didn't know about the _thing_, the monster inside her — the one she kept secret even from Nan, because monsters like that caused kids to be taken away from their friends and homes, never to be seen again.

The one who did the talking flicked out a switchblade and, with lazy showmanship, turned it to reflect the gleam of a streetlight. Behind it, she could see his ugly, pale face, all slashed up, with black tattoos scrawled across ill-healed scars like alien writing.

She thought of Kath, who'd turned all weird and started doing red sand after being gang raped, and of little Timmy Dumbo Ears, always too eager to prove his worth, found cut up in a ditch not far from where they stood.

_Hey, Red Riding Hood. Want us to teach you how to have a little fun?_

"I know how to have fun", she said. Their lewd grins widened in reply.

_Look at her. Ain't even scared. Well, girl. We gon' teach you to be scared._

They were still laughing when the big bad wolf inside her stretched free and bared its blue-white fangs.

o o o

Shepard jerked awake at the blue-white flash that lit her cabin through the skylight. A gentle shudder beneath her feet told her that the Normandy had just jumped through a mass relay. Then all was dim and still again, with just the ship's constant hum reverberating through the fuselage.

Groggy from sleep, she rubbed at her eyes and sat up.

She hadn't dreamed about her time with the Reds in... God knows how long. And she didn't usually just fall asleep at her desk, either. What the hell had Chakwas given her before she left the medbay?

The busted leg was completely numb. After she moved it, it cramped from thigh to toe. For a few minutes, all she could do was grimace and curse through her teeth, trying to live through the pain.

Goddamn skin grafts. Goddamn Pragia. And goddamn Blood Pack and their predilection for flamethrowers. Who knew things would be _worse_ after Chakwas fixed the mess on her leg? Wasn't modern stem cell tech supposed to have relieved mankind of the inconvenience of convalescence? Vaguely Shepard recalled Chakwas saying something about sacrificing comfort for speed of recovery. Apparently the cloned tissue slapped on her leg was some sort of miracle goo capable of fusing in days instead of weeks. The downside was that, until it did, it would hurt like a bitch.

When the last recalcitrant muscle in Shepard's leg had finally relaxed, she wiped sweat from her brow and looked around.

The green light on her private terminal was blinking. Handling correspondence was right after public speeches on her list of least favorite things to do, but at least it would give her something other to think about than nightmares and pain.

The interface powered up at her touch. Names, places and dates started scrolling down the screen. Local comm-buoy grids used complex algorithms to load-balance data traffic, rarely optimal for a ship as highly mobile as the Normandy, and after just returning from the back of nowhere, her crew now had two days' worth of communications backlog to deal with. As usual, at least half of it was addressed directly at their commander. Shrugging off the last dregs of sleep, Shepard started triaging 'can do laters' from 'already lates'.

Not far down from the top was a letter from Admiral Anderson. Too much a realist to expect good news, Shepard opened it.

The Admiral's efforts to find evidence about the Reapers on Horizon had failed. After venting some of his frustrations about that, he went on to give an account on recent Council activity. As Chairman Udina's advisor, he was in the position to relay some of the most classified intel in the galaxy. But whether it was her exhaustion, the meds or lingering pain, Shepard's mind began to wander.

The infirmary-bound debrief after blowing up the decommissioned Cerberus facility on Pragia had been... interesting. The mission had been Krios' first real foray into front lines with her, and after its completion, he'd informed her that she was a dangerous lunatic. Coming from a hitman famous for preferring to take out his marks at point-blank range, Shepard supposed she could consider that an achievement.

She knew he'd catch on. He just wasn't used to working with an L5n biotic. They needed to practice more. But she kept making up excuses to cut their sessions short. Drilling tactics in the cargo bay with the drell reminded her too much of doing so with another sniper.

As usual, the consequences of cowardice were excruciating. Shepard winced as she shifted her aching leg to stop it from growing numb again. She made another effort to concentrate on Anderson's letter.

Soon her eyes were glazing over again.

_Goddamn pyro. How could Krios let him get so close? That creepy bastard would have been easy pickings for... would have blown the fuel tank right off him without missing a pace, the moment he stepped through the door._

It was unfair and she knew it. They made a good enough team, with Jack and Krios. But she was used to more than 'good enough'.

The buzz of strong meds in her head made thinking about Garrus easier than usual.

He'd been away for more than three weeks. She knew she needed to start looking for another second-in-command and finding a tech to work on calibrating and upgrading the Normandy's weaponry. And for God's sakes, she needed to tell the quartermaster to clear out Garrus' locker, so she couldn't go and stare at it like some trashy holonovela heroine when making her daily rounds through the ship.

A now-familiar, nauseating weight tried to settle in Shepard's stomach. She gritted her teeth and shoved it away without looking at it close enough to name it.

_Just a few more months, Elena. You can do that, can't you? Useless to waste energy on the burning crash site you call your private life. More importantly... you can't afford it. There's too much at stake._

Realizing that Anderson's letter would require more presence of mind than she could currently muster, Shepard closed it and continued to browse the list of messages. If she was lucky, the rest would be meaningless noise. She needed to go lie down in her bed and stay there for the next six or seven hours, hopefully asleep for the most of it.

Close to the end, she found an unsigned audio message, dated within an hour of landing on Pragia.

Lacking a title or a sender ID, the message was encrypted with a private key known only to a select few people in the galaxy, the master copy of which Shepard kept stored in her head implant. The reply address was a rentable proxy on some mining colony. The touch of paranoia felt strangely familiar.

She made her terminal bring up the headers. Not much could be gleaned from them, aside from a long list of buoys that had relayed the message. It _could_ be something classified from Hackett... but from experience, Shepard doubted an undercover mission from the Fleet Admiral would have taken only 21.53 seconds to explain.

Suddenly she felt very much awake.

Would EDI be able to pick up an audio transmission between the terminal and her comm? She wasn't entirely certain about the extent of the AI's loyalty to the Illusive Man. But perhaps a narrow stream of electrons at a random point inside the ship was beyond even EDI's impressive capabilities to observe.

"Play it," she said to her terminal. "On my comm."

Decryption data rolled down the screen and a soft blip indicated the start of the recording. Then a voice emerged from Shepard's commlink as if speaking straight in her ear.

"_Shepard. I know I have no right to ask, but... I need your help. I've found the scumbag who protects Sidonis, and I can't get to him on my own. I'm waiting for you on the Citadel. If I don't hear from you in ten days, I'm... well, I'm going to assume you won't be coming. Vakarian out."_

She stared at the terminal. Then she leaned back in her chair.

Neat and spotless, the cabin around her showed no sign that twenty-three cycles ago it had looked like someone had released a rabid rachni in it. In fact, if not for the few personal items on the nightstand and desk, one could have thought no one even lived there. Beyond the skylight, in the void of the Attican Traverse, the Normandy's mass effect field flickered against the refracted light of an open star cluster. The migraine-inducing distortion effect slowly grew as the ship accelerated through space warped by an FTL envelope.

"Replay," Shepard said.

"_Shepard. I know I have no right to ask, but... I need your help. I've found —"_

It was so short... so to the point. Desperate for clues, she listened for background noise in the recording, but the audio pickup was clean. A comm booth, most likely. Could be anywhere.

_What have you been up to, Garrus? Do you sound angry because of Sidonis... or because I'm the last person you wanted to contact?_

She'd watched the security footage. After leaving her quarters, he'd visited his locker and walked out, with nothing but his guns and a change of clothes in a bag over his shoulder. No notes, no goodbyes. A severing cut almost surgical in its cleanness. She'd fully expected never to hear from him again.

She didn't know how to read his request for help. Truth be told, she didn't even know if the emotion in his voice _was_ anger, or just reluctance, regret or barely repressed rage. But — did it matter? It was _him._

She leaned over her terminal.

"Audio reply selected message," she said. "Record. On my way. End recording. Encrypt and send."

"Message sent," the terminal replied in its synthetic female voice.

_Sent._ Not_ stored in outbox. _So, they'd still been within tightbeam range of the comm buoy. Otherwise her message would have had to wait several hours until they reached the next mass relay and its satellites. The QEC link to Cerberus HQ could be used to transmit data, but Shepard would rather have strangled herself than expose her personal correspondence to the Illusive Man.

All of which was a long fucking way to say that she was now committed.

She checked the time and pulled a nav chart from her terminal. A few minutes later she stood, grabbed her jacket and touched her commlink.

"Commander," came her pilot's voice. Given the time, he should have handed over his seat to the Cerberus relief pilot hours ago — but Shepard would have bet her amp his backside was still firmly planted in it.

"Joker," she said, already limping her way to the elevator. "Change of plans."

o o o

Three relay jumps and a somewhat unsatisfactory night's rest later, Shepard stood at the helm to watch the Citadel come into view from the violet shimmer of the Serpent nebula.

Leaning on Joker's seat to take some weight off her injured leg, she listened as he hailed the traffic control. An asari operator cleared them for docking, and the tower VI relayed them their approach vector. Never one to miss a chance to show off, Joker flew the massive frigate manually within the arms of the great space station and down a priority aisle.

Their trip to the Citadel had taken a little over sixteen hours. Shepard couldn't help but wonder how different things would have been for someone traveling without the benefit of a private starship. How long would it have taken to get from Omega to the heart of Council space, for instance — a third of the galaxy to cross on slow freighters and the odd scheduled passenger transport? A week? Or two? Far too much time with nothing to do but think, and to remember... and come up with questions Shepard didn't know how to answer.

After the docking clamps had locked them in place, Shepard spoke to the crew, granting them three shifts of shore leave. She'd been driving them hard and wasn't surprised to hear their clapping and hollering all the way into the cockpit.

"You too, Joker," she said after killing the PA. "Go find yourself a girl or something. EDI, is Chora's Den still in operation?"

"Negative, Commander. I can run a search for similar establishments, but according to my observations, Mr. Moreau is far more likely to remain onboard and watch recordings of asari —"

The pilot sputtered. "Hey! You backstabbing, buggy, sixty-four-bit..."

Shepard rubbed her forehead. "Well, whatever gets you out of that damn chair, Joker," she said. "That's an order."

"Aye aye, ma'am." He turned back to review the acquisition list for ship repairs. The Cerberus chief engineer knew what he was doing, but if Joker could personally have checked every bolt and rivet that was used on his baby, Shepard knew he would have done it.

"You meeting someone special up there?" the pilot continued before she could leave, his head bent over the datapad.

Shepard frowned. Joker was one of the few people who had the guts and licence to speak openly to her. So far, she'd had no reason to regret it. "Why do you ask, helmsman?"

He shrugged, feigning disinterest. "Just wondering. We took a stiff turn all of a sudden, back there in the Attican, and now you're speaking in actual human language again, instead of cro-magnon grunts."

There was no way Joker or anyone could know the real reason they were on the Citadel. There had to be lower-deck scuttlebutt going on about Garrus' disappearance, but... no, he was probably just fishing for a reaction. _Cro-magnon? Have I really been that bad?_ Shepard suspected she already knew. There was a fine line between maintaining an air of awe-inducing superiority and being an insufferable, unreasonable grouch, and she got the feeling that lately her scales had tipped in favor of the latter.

"You just check your charts, flyboy," she said.

He touched his cap, unfazed as always. "Yes, ma'am."

Shepard pushed away from the pilot's seat and straightened her jacket. Making an effort to hide her impatience, she took a last look at the skyscraper-studded expanse that reached out and away from the docks, and turned toward the bridge, careful not to betray that her leg still ached. Better if only Chakwas knew the extent of her occasional afflictions. Evidence of her mortality could hardly be beneficial for crew morale.

"Say hi if it's someone we both know," she heard Joker say behind her back.

_Cheeky bastard._ Shepard activated her omnitool and typed in a handle and a short message.

She'd just passed the CIC when her comm pinged her on a reply.

_Cafe at Zakera 5233/26, two std hours? _About as impersonal as a line of chat could get. No reason for her heart rate to pick up... no reason at all.

_Can make it in one,_ she typed.

This time the reply appeared in seconds.

_Acknowledged._

o o o

"Please refrain from smoking in the vehicle," the shuttle's VI repeated for the fifth time in its softly reproachful machine voice.

Shepard muttered a curse around her cigarette, one hand piloting the X3M, the other tapping at its haptic adaptive interface. For some reason, the damned thing was trying to take her to the Bachjret Ward. She'd hacked its controls to enable manual driving, but the Citadel was a big place and without the navigator, she was flying blind.

Talking back to the VI won her exactly six seconds of peace.

"Warning. Continuing to smoke in the vehicle will lead to the termination of the flight. The Citadel regulations state —"

"Goddammit." Shepard crushed her cigarette against the dashboard. "Fascist piece of shit."

"Cleanup costs have been added in your bill," the VI announced without empathy.

_Christ, I hate this place._

Not only was smoking forbidden outside officially designated areas, no matter how hard Shepard stepped on the accelerator, the rental speeder refused to go faster than the stately 42 clicks per hour allowed for traffic on the Citadel. By the time she'd downloaded a map on her omnitool and found her destination — a commercial high-rise in the mid-ward district — she was running fifteen minutes late and ready to kick someone in the quads.

Despite a pistol in a hidden shoulder holster and a butterfly knife in her boot, the weapon detector didn't so much as cough as she stepped out of the garage. Thank God for new connections. And for good old painkillers. After taking some pills strong enough to fell a horse, Shepard didn't even limp as she took an elevator to the 26th floor and strode through a well-lit shopping arcade. For once, no one seemed to recognize her. Then again, she barely did so herself, wearing her only real set of civvies: tight black jeans and a sleek biker jacket. Her reflection in store windows looked long-legged and feral. Half military rigor, half brute aggression. _Like a fucking trained doberman._

The past weeks had taken her from the corrupt neon throb of Nos Astra to the nuclear waste fields of Tuchanka, but none of it had made her feel queasy like seeing the unassuming cafeteria that matched the coordinates in Garrus' message. It was just a faded diner with a view over the Ward, but stepping through its doors took more courage than facing a thresher maw on foot or fighting an Eclipse army on a narrow, windy bridge six hundred feet high in the air.

Late morning station time, the place had only a handful of customers peppered around: a harried-looking asari typing on a haptic terminal, an old human couple, three salarian construction workers having a very early lunch. No turians, at least not in plain sight. Shepard strolled down between the tables, thumbs hooked into her pockets.

Halfway through the diner, she saw him, sitting behind some fake plants in the farthest corner from the main entry.

Like an idiot, she stopped to stare.

He was looking out of a window, one hand on the table near a mug of something. The clothes on him seemed fresh out of a store, an unusual dark red in color, with a high collar and a fitted cut that suggested the quasi-military style most turians favored. He looked perfectly at ease — cocky, even — but she knew better than to take his sang-froid at face value. Like all sharpshooters worth their salt, he possessed an uncanny ability to appear calm.

He didn't seem to have noticed her. But she knew that might have been just as much a pretense as his composure.

_I've talked to a fucking Reaper. I can do this. _Aware that his visor could track her vitals, she walked over to him.

"Hey," she said.

He turned to look at her, steady enough that she knew he'd been long aware of her presence. Whatever hope she'd entertained that things would just fall in place again disappeared at seeing the look on his face... or rather, the lack of it. He wasn't the most stone-faced turian she knew, but right now, she might as well have tried to read emotion off a rock.

_Well, you didn't think you deserved a passionate public snog, did you? _At least her heart wasn't pounding. But if his visor could read hormone levels, all bets were off.

"Shepard," he said, and nodded.

With a start she realized that the smart bandage that had covered the right side of his face was gone. Way too early, but without Chakwas he probably couldn't get it maintained often enough. _Yes, concentrate on the details. Much easier._ She took a chair across from him. They sat in silence while a bubblegum-chewing asari waitress sashayed over to take her order, too busy batting her eyes at Garrus to notice he was sitting in the company of the Savior of the Citadel.

"Sorry I'm late," Shepard said after the waitress had swayed away. "My shuttle wanted to take me to a hanar spa. You been waiting long?"

He shook his head, one of his gestures adopted for human benefit. She wasn't sure it was actually meant as a reply, so much as just a sign of bemusement.

To her horror, she realized she had no idea what else to say. She wasn't used to needing to _think_ about what to say to him. Did he expect her to confront him about his desertion? A soldier would, especially a turian. But the nature of his post on the SR2 had never been military as much as voluntary. Also, talking about it would have involved talking about— No. If someone had the right to ask hard questions (and maybe yell a little and throw a few things around the room), it was him. But he just kept staring at her, silent and inscrutable.

She couldn't help wondering if it was the same look he might have given a detainee in a C-Sec interrogation room, trying to decide whether to be nice and play by the rules, or just point a gun at the bastard and start counting down from ten.

She pulled herself together.

"So. Sidonis?" she asked.

The spell was broken. Garrus blinked and looked away. The angle exposed the damaged right side of his head, an eye-stopping mass of ropy scars that reached all the way from his neck plates to the tip of his mandible. Given enough time, the smart bandage would have fixed most of it, but now he'd always carry the memory of his one-man showdown.

A memory as tangible as the rush of blood in her veins surfaced, of licking the side of his mouth, of her arms around his neck as he arched over her and inside her in the half-darkness of her loft. His hot skin had tasted of metal and spice.

_Well, there goes the fucking heart rate._

"Yeah," he said. "Found a lead on him through my old C-Sec contacts. There's a specialist here on the Citadel, name's Fade. He's an expert at helping people disappear. Sidonis was seen with him."

_My, what a deep voice you have, grandmother. _Now that she'd heard him purr, Shepard could actually _feel _an echo of it in his lower register... distracting as hell.

_Focus, woman, before you start slobbering like that idiot waitress._

"How're we gonna find him?" she asked.

"Well, figured you'd want to catch up with your friend Captain Bailey. If there's anyone in the C-Sec who knows how to contact Fade, it's him."

So, that was the reason he'd selected this particular diner. Bailey's office was situated a few floors down in the same building complex.

Shepard didn't need to ask what Garrus planned to do once they found his old teammate. He'd talked about Sidonis' betrayal before, about the team he'd put together to fight injustice on Omega and how it had been wiped out. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. It wasn't like the piece of shit deserved more than a bullet in the head, for the ten lives he owed. But somehow, looking at Garrus now, Shepard realized she felt... off. Sure, he'd taken out his share of villains, but only ones who'd made the mistake of pointing a weapon at him or some innocent schmuck. Even with Dr. Saleon, it had been Shepard who pulled the trigger. This time she knew Garrus planned to do it himself.

Not that she'd ever say anything. Hell, she'd shot a man who'd tried to blackmail her with her past.

The waitress returned with Shepard's coffee. As usual on the Citadel, the beverage was barely heated, in accordance with health and safety regulations. The waitress herself seemed warm enough, though, going by the way she leaned over the table to pour Garrus another drink — piping hot, Shepard noticed to her annoyance.

"You want some _murra'kah_ with your _srakhii,_ sugar?" The waitress winked at him and smiled, blue jaws chewing the obnoxious, fruit scented substance in her mouth. "I can put extra _gish_ on top for you."

Maybe she didn't smell nice enough, because Garrus declined her with what Shepard translated as a polite smile. After failing to arouse anything except Shepard's urge to slap her (and maybe throw her through the window for good measure), the waitress sighed and left, with the beverage flask dangling from her finger and a last lingering look over her shoulder.

_Jesus Christ. I can't believe that having half his face ground to mincemeat made him even more attractive._ Then again, now Shepard knew why asari liked turians so much. Come to think of it, they were probably taught all about it in primary school. Bitches.

"Sure, I could go say hello to Bailey," she said. "If you're ready, we can do it right now."

"That's—" Garrus looked away. "Thank you. I was hoping you'd say that."

What had he _feared_ she'd say? He knew her too well to have expected any sort of hormonal breakdown. Maybe he'd been bracing for rejection? Had he really thought she'd raced through the galaxy just to chew his head off for leaving? _Baby, you can ask anything of me, and I'll give it to you._ The visceral depth of the sentiment terrified her. It was the kind of irrational shit that landed people in the brig... or in court-martial.

"You packing?" Garrus continued. "We might need to rough up a few people."

"Sure. How 'bout you? Still got a licence around here?"

Making sure no one watched, he flashed her the butt of a handgun inside his jacket, in a shoulder holster not unlike her own. "Benefits of working for an ex-Spectre."

_Working? Or having worked? _Shepard's eyes dropped toward his three-taloned hand on the table. She remembered how his claws felt sliding down her bare skin. The tactile memory nearly made her shiver.

"How've you been?" she blurted before she could stop herself.

He looked away. His mandibles stuttered against his mouth, a sign of hesitation. Her heart rate picked up again.

Shit. She _wanted_ to fall apart, to start asking pointless questions. But... he'd left, for Christ's sakes. Was there a clearer way to say how he felt? The least she owed him was to respect that decision. She'd help him and let him go, the way he wanted. Hell, it was what _she'd_ thought she'd wanted. It wasn't his fucking fault that she'd been pathetically wrong.

"Aw, Christ." She pushed up from the chair before he could figure out how to brush her off. No reason to make things more painful than they already were. "Let's just go, alright?"

"No, wait. Shepard —"

She looked at him and to her shame, held her breath.

"Thanks for coming," he said, his eyes on her grave and strangely joyless. "I appreciate it. I know I have no favors left to pull from you."

_He thinks _he_ owes _me? _Jesus._ She forced her mouth into an imitation of a smile.

"Favors? You don't need no freakin' favors, Scars. Come on, lets go find ourselves some bad guys to shoot."

o o o

Good old Captain Bailey put them on a trail of scum and villainy through the warehouses of Zakera Ward. It surprised her how fast they slipped into the easy way they'd always worked together, smart-ass one liners and gunslinging galore. But the pretense ended like a broken holovid as soon as they were alone again.

"Harkin," Garrus growled as he steered their hacked rental away from the meeting with the volus. His hands were gripping the wheel tighter than necessary. "Working for the Blue Suns now, huh? That means heavy machinery. Dammit! We can't take on something like that with a couple of side arms and an attitude."

In another life, Shepard would have cracked a joke about the things she'd accomplished with only her attitude. Now she just looked out of the window as they pulled onto the airway. Hours had passed since the Normandy had docked on the station, but the view was still the same; there was no simulated day cycle in the wards, just the emptiness of deep space beyond the glinting, glowing steel-and-concrete sprawl that covered the insides of the massive station.

It all felt so... wrong. Not just the big picture, but the little details. Like how she'd always insisted on driving, and then tolerated his (undeserved) tongue-in-cheek backchat about the way she handled anything bigger than a scooter. This time she'd allowed him to take the speeder's controls without a word, just because the lack of that banter would have felt like shit.

She didn't know what to do with herself around him, anymore. She knew they'd have to talk, but how? _Sorry, Shepard. I don't think it would work._ She could almost hear him say it, painfully awkward, and cringed. She wanted to remember him being confident and charming, not stammering that he didn't want anything to do with her, anymore.

"Your suit and gear are still on the Normandy," she said.

She sensed him give her a sharp glance. "Shepard, in case you haven't noticed, you're not a Spectre anymore. You know as well as I that they'd never let us walk around armed like that."

"Well, maybe I've got a big package I need to deliver to the Factory District. Maybe it's got Harkin's name on it."

"Huh." Garrus lowered his chin. "You can get something like that past security?"

"Trust me. Cerberus has a backdoor or a mole in virtually every Citadel system. As long as a shipment's logged as coming from the SR2, I can make it show up as baby toys in the scanners."

She felt him hesitate.

"Baby toys?" he asked, then, very mildly.

"Asari underwear, varren feed, hanar cross-stitch samplers... just checking how high I can make the customs guy raise his brows." Shepard bit her tongue. _Time to shut up, Elena, you're starting to babble._

He seemed doubtful, but steered their car toward the docks.

In less than forty-five minutes, Shepard was in and out of the Normandy again.

True enough, the scanners didn't even blink at the float container that glided behind her. Unfortunately the same couldn't be said about the cambots camped in the docking bay, or the noisy leeches that came attached.

Shepard sorely regretted having had her temper get the better of her and punching the living daylights out of Khalisah bin al-Jilani. Westerlund News had made a lot of money out of that piece, and now every single sensationalist hack in the known space wanted to replicate the trick of goading the infamous Commander Shepard into doing something violent. Trying her best to ignore their outrageous assertions, she made her way back into the garage, where Garrus waited for her in their X3M.

"I hate this place," she muttered as he drove them out with the windows darkened, leaving behind the boldest couple of paparazzi who'd actually followed her into the private parking lot. Why weren't there laws to prevent the media vultures from preying on her? Shepard was certain they posed a bigger risk to her health than hot coffee, in the form of an aneurysm that would kill her if one more suicidal moron asked her about deserting the Alliance Navy or working for a known terrorist leader.

Before, Garrus would have joked about her blood pressure, making her snort and relax. Now he just piloted the speeder away from the docks in silence. She couldn't help stealing looks at him, trying to guess what he was thinking. But if anything beyond getting to Sidonis moved under his fringe, he never showed it.

_God, this sucks._

The inconvenience of sexual attraction was one thing, but sitting beside him, quiet and tense, made her realize how much she'd needed their easy camaraderie.

To be friends with him again... if she had the chance to convince him to come back, would she take it? Pay the price of never being touched by him again? Could she forgive him that he didn't want her? She only had to think of _that_ night, of how she'd flipped at seeing him flirt with the busty Eclipse merc, to know the truth.

But to lose him completely... Seemed that, either way, she was fucked. And not in the way she would have preferred.

They suited up in an abandoned warehouse, not far from where they were heading. A short ride later the jagged façade of the old prefab foundry emerged above them from behind a corner, black and forbidding against the shadow of the ward. The place looked deserted, but what with the meeting the volus had arranged, Shepard knew otherwise.

The X3M glided to a silent stop in an empty, dark parking lot outside the fence, hidden from view from the entrance by concrete walls crowned with barb wire.

Instead of getting out immediately, Garrus sat still for a second, eyes fixed forward as if lost in thought. Shepard stole a look at his tense profile. Again, she felt that touch of wrongness.

"You still plan on killing Sidonis?" she heard herself ask.

He looked at her sharply. "What, you making sure I won't regret it?"

She shrugged, as surprised at her question as he seemed to be.

"It doesn't matter how I feel, Shepard. I hired him. I'll pull the trigger and live with the consequences."

So, it was the old turian chain of responsibility thing again. You put someone in a position they couldn't handle, the blame was also on you. Garrus liked to call himself a bad turian, but some of their ruthless principles seemed etched deeper in his blood than others.

"That's a cold reason to add something like that on your conscience," she said.

She hadn't nearly earned the right to play the little voice of good on his shoulder, and what she could see of his expression told as much. "It's not that long since this was how the turian military worked, Shepard. It'll be quick and painless, unlike everyone he betrayed. It's more than he deserves, but as long as he's dead, I'll be satisfied."

"Just making sure that's how you wanna play it."

"I'm sure," he said, low and vicious. He grabbed his helmet and opened the door. Shepard shook her head and followed.

Standing up, she muffled an oath at an unexpected tear of pain, and steadied herself against the car.

_Shit. My leg._

With everything else on her mind, she'd completely forgotten. The painkillers had done their job _too_ well. She should have popped more of them on her visit to the Normandy — now it was too late. She looked around, but Garrus was busy doing a last-minute checkup on his rifles.

Well. How bad could it get? The hardsuit could practically bathe her in medi-gel if required. Already, she could feel its soothing, cool touch mute the pain. And she knew that as soon as the rush of adrenaline started, she'd stop noticing anything smaller than a missing limb or head. Shaking off her momentary unease, she closed the car door and pulled on her helmet.

At the factory gates, Harkin and his Blue Suns were already waiting.

o o o

Sense by sense, the world started to come back to her.

She was lying on her back on the concrete floor, with someone yelling her name through the comm. Dazed, she stared at the faraway ceiling of the storage hall with its maze of robotic arms and cranes. She didn't seem badly hurt, or in pain... or that at least was what she hoped, instead of the possibility that she'd broken her neck and was now a quadriplegic. To disprove that theory, she wriggled her fingers and found that they still worked.

In a flash, her short-term memory returned. Harkin, deploying two YMIR mechs on them. They'd torn down the shields and armor on one of the killing machines, and then a shot from Garrus' Viper had pushed its mass accelerator into critical overload. The ensuing explosion had taken down the other mech... and sent Shepard spinning through air from where she'd been trying to vault over a rail in an attempt to put something between her and the blast.

Her damned leg had chosen to give out at the worst possible moment. Nonsensically, Shepard felt like laughing. _You fucking idiot. Could have gotten yourself killed..._

With a rattle of armored feet, Garrus was there and knelt, and ran his omnitool's scanner across her, checking for vitals and injuries. She already knew what he'd see. No broken bones, no internal bleeding... no concussion. Courtesy of Cerberus, the bionic woman survives yet another brush with death.

"Damn," Garrus said. She couldn't see his expression through the mirror finish of his helmet, but she recognized the way he sagged in relief. "You're alright, Shepard?"

Maybe the suit was pumping her with something more than just medi-gel, because she couldn't help grinning at him through her visor.

The fight had been... perfect. Everything she'd found herself missing with the others. He'd just _known _what she wanted, almost before she knew it herself, placing armor-piercing rounds where she needed them with what looked like sheer instinct but was in truth a combination of talent and endless hours of practice... overloading shields so she could fling exposed targets in the air with her biotics... providing cover fire when she charged across the battlefield to detonate residue energy currents and send enemies flying, and blast gaping holes in anyone who remained. Hell yeah, they were more than just a good team. They were _beautiful_ together.

Had she really planned to give that up?

"Told you, Scars," she said. "Half machine."

He stiffened.

_Smooth, woman. Real smooth._

When he offered his hand, she took it and got back on her feet, and sat on a crate to unlatch her helmet.

Sweat ran down her face and neck. The air stank of burning plastic and electronics. Mech parts still popped and cracked where they'd landed between cargo containers and forklifts. She felt tired, and hungry, and battered — and for a moment, _right_, for the first time in ages. _Can't you see, big guy? _she wanted to howl._ Took down two goddamn YMIR's, just the two of us! We're meant to be together!_

It was the usual post-battle high talking, of course. But she'd been feeling down too long not to ride the wave of euphoria while it lasted.

Garrus tore off his helmet. For a moment he stared at her, the Viper forgotten in his hand, confusion and anxiety struggling on his face.

"I shouldn't have —" His usually melodic voice grated. "Are you really alright, Shepard?"

Her barriers were getting back up. Her heart rate was slowing, the buzz of dark energy was starting to fade from her nerves. She knew she'd sport a fresh set of bruises the following day, but other than having been shaken and stirred, there was nothing wrong with her — at least, nothing that hadn't been wrong with her to start with.

"Yeah. Don't sweat it, big guy," she said.

"The hell I won't! It was my fault, I took the shot too early and you know it —" He was starting to pace. "You could have been killed, Shepard —"

She frowned. He'd never been one to fly off the handle like that. "Garrus, it wasn't your fault. My leg's busted."

He shuddered, and wheeled at her.

"What?"

"Couldn't run fast enough. A burn wound, from a couple of days ago."

She'd expected him to look relieved. He didn't. "You're _hurt?_ You're _hurt_, and — spirits. What the hell were you thinking! You should have told me —"

The moment had in it a sense of déjà vu. She fixed him with a surprisingly steady gaze — as usual, panic had a weird effect on her.

"Shouldn't we go get Harkin before the cops show up?"

He scowled down at her. She couldn't understand why. Wasn't Harkin the reason they'd come?

For a second she was sure he'd say something she either really needed or really, really didn't want to hear.

Then his expression closed up again. He popped the heat sink from his Viper, compacted the rifle and locked it neatly into its harness. One hand reaching for a pistol, he turned.

"You're right. Let's go before he makes a run for it," he said and strode toward the control room in the back.

Retrieving her Eviscerator from the floor, Shepard followed.

They found Harkin holed up in his makeshift office. Shepard didn't say much when Garrus strong-armed the rotten ex-cop. Harkin was scum, she would have done the same. She only stepped in to lay a hand on Garrus' shoulder when he almost crushed the man's throat before getting what he wanted. Even through his hardsuit, she imagined she could feel him radiate heat and rage, but he responded to her touch and stepped back, not unlike an big dog letting go of its prey.

"Terminus really changed you, huh, Garrus," Harkin coughed, spitting blood on the dusty concrete.

_Terminus? _Shepard wondered. _Or just me?_ Garrus hadn't exactly been a boy scout to begin with — she'd run a background check on him and knew all about the civil rights violations and police brutality that littered his files — but in the C-Sec, he'd just been frustrated with red tape. This was something else.

His aggression worked. Another meeting was arranged, and Shepard watched Garrus shoot Harkin when he tried to inch his way to the door. For a second she thought Harkin was dead, but the man continued to writhe in agony on the floor, spitting curses and holding his injured leg.

Her head still throbbed from the blast, but that wasn't the reason she felt ill. It didn't feel right... not right at all. Garrus had been so polite, back on the SR1. _Yes ma'am._ A bit of a hothead, sure, but not cruel.

She'd seen it all, with the Reds. Lost brothers, friends, lovers — how it screwed with your head, going down that evil spiral of self-justification, hoping to lay your ghosts to rest, just to find that spilling blood would make them go nowhere.

Why did she care? She would have done the same.

_You know why._

They left the factory and changed back to civilian clothes. Shepard let Garrus drive again, and he did so in silence, focused on the knowledge that payback was only moments away. Tired and starving after her heavy use of biotics, Shepard chowed down on a ration bar she'd thrown in the float container. Its synthetic protein taste almost made her gag. She couldn't bring herself to chase it down with an energy drink, as much as she needed the fuel.

Garrus set the speeder down at a garage a hundred yards from the Orbital Lounge.

They had twenty minutes left before the meeting. This close to the Presidium Junction, Shepard could feel the lightened gravity. She stretched her bruised shoulders against the seat. There was an ominous throb in her leg, probably where her graft was all messed up by the interference of medi-gel — Chakwas would skin her (quite literally, all things considered), but there wasn't much she could do about that, now.

Beside her, Garrus stared unseeing through the windshield.

She could sense the weight of hot, black emotion in him. He'd always been intense, but not like this. Not like something inside him was getting twisted beyond repair.

"Harkin's a bloody menace," he growled, his voice a low rumble that chilled her. "Shouldn't have just let him go. He deserved to be punished."

_My, what sharp teeth you have, grandmother._

Shepard couldn't help thinking of those turian officers of old, the ones who'd had to carry out military justice on their men. What would it do to a person, having to execute one of your own — someone you'd eaten and laughed and crouched in the trenches with? Someone who'd trusted you to bring them alive through hell and worse? Garrus was the kind of guy who'd want to bond with his men, to see their family pictures and listen to their outrageous retirement plans. And he wasn't a bad enough judge of character to have hired anyone completely evil. It was more likely that Sidonis had been a decent enough guy, at first... that they'd started out as friends.

Garrus had always been about doing what was right. Maybe he hated Sidonis enough today to go through with his plan. But Shepard knew him. She knew he wasn't like her, able to stay detached. He _felt_ about things. Too much. Maybe he'd be fine today, and tomorrow — but it would stay with him, pulling that trigger. As time went by, it would start eating him from inside, turn him into something he wasn't.

But even if she wanted to stop him... what could she do? With the choices she'd made, she'd be the biggest hypocrite in the history of mankind, to try to talk him out of his revenge.

"Harkin's not worth it," she said, instead. "Let C-Sec deal with him."

"Yeah. Too late to change that, now." He scanned the structures outside, visor undoubtedly displaying distances and heights relative to the meeting point. "I need to set up."

"What do you need me to do?"

"He'll run if he sees me. Go and wave him over. Keep him talking. I'll let you know when he's in my sights."

And that was how she ended up with Garrus' rifle trained at the back of her head.

Sidonis was an emaciated, shaking wreck of a turian in front of her, his face bare of markings except for some lingering traces of badly removed ink, his spine bent like an old man's, so that he wasn't much taller than her. She could see that he was tormented by something far worse than simple exhaustion and fear. It looked like his soul had been crushed and then hacked out with a rusty spoon. There was nothing left to kill. He was already dead.

The physical and mental fatigue of the past three weeks weighed on Shepard like a suffocating blanket. She was tired. Too tired to see the cowardly maggot's brain sprayed in red mist over the plaza. Too tired to listen to the screams that would follow. Too tired to have her face pointed out from surveillance footage, and to bribe and threaten and charm her way out of C-Sec investigations.

Too tired to see the man she loved change into someone she didn't know.

"Don't move," she said to Sidonis. "Right now, I'm the only thing standing between you and a hole in the head."


End file.
